The Council of the Princeton University Community voted on Monday to gut due process for students accused of sexual misconduct. The week before last it was the turn of the faculty to genuflect as the hearse bearing the remains of due process rolled past. This unsavory episode highlights two parlous issues. First, there is the problem of sexual misconduct on campus, which was always at unacceptable levels and appears to be getting worse. Second, there is the dangerous license federal agencies have to rewrite law.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as repeatedly doing the same thing while expecting different results. Attributing changing results to an unchanging policy seems likewise off kilter. Yet until two or three years ago the protocol for adjudicating cases of alleged sexual misconduct by students at Princeton had remained unchanged for decades, not exactly a strong basis on which to conclude that due process for the accused provoked an increase in sexual assaults over those same decades.
