For nearly six years now, a federal mandate has manhandled American colleges. The Department of Education’s 2011 guidance on campus sexual misconduct reinterpreted a gender parity law—Title IX of the Higher Education Act—to police colleges’ responses to reported sexual assaults. In so doing, the Obama administration’s edict kicked off a procedural regime that actually undermined gender parity: The procedures overwhelmingly favor a (typically female) complainant’s testimony and leave a (usually male) respondent in the lurch.

Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson trace the ideological and political roots of this harmful policy shift to a cultural interest in reparations to the second sex. In 2012, Taylor coauthored Mismatch, an influential analysis of the harmful consequences of affirmative action policies, which too often complicate the inequality they’re meant to correct. Terry Eastland, in reference to the deepened inequity Mismatch revealed, wrote in these pages that “the problem . . . is a system of preferences that perversely hurts the students it’s intended to help.” The same could be said now of Title IX guidance.