The sad thing about George Will’s latest fiasco is that he had a point, as you can learn from reading Simon Van Zuylen-Wood’s piece on sexual misconduct at Swarthmore College. There really is a conflict between various progressive values that makes adjudicating allegations of rape on campus a terribly difficult thing to do.
The thing is, Zuylen-Wood was able to write about this touchy subject without being dismissive or embarrassing his publishers. Swarthmore has a particularly hard time finding the right balance because of their Quaker traditions and emphasis on consensus decision-making in conflict resolution. Their instinct is to have two people work out their differences, which isn’t appropriate when one party is alleging that they have been physically violated.
But conservatives really do have a solid point that campus boards are not courts of law and there are inherent flaws in any judicial system that ignores due process, doesn’t necessarily let a defendant confront his accusers, and can dole out life-ruining verdicts.
Part of the problem is the nature of the beast. When an unambiguous crime has been committed, the best procedure is to involve the police. But universities should have a higher standard than just what can be considered a crime. What to do, for example, when a male student enters a female student’s dorm room uninvited and finding her naked refuses to leave?
Is that something the police need to be involved in? Is anything short of expulsion an appropriate punishment? And who gets to decide what really happened when testimony differs?
The larger problem, by far, is that universities have not been taking reports of sexual assault seriously enough. But there are no easy answers for how to set up a system that is fair and effective.
But George Will didn’t further the debate one iota. What he suggested was that being a victim of rape confers status on the victims. And he was utterly dismissive of a Swarthmore woman who felt she was raped, because she had had consensual encounters with the man previously and didn’t report the crime for a month and a half. Mr. Will doesn’t spend much time talking to women about sexual assault, obviously, or he would understand the many emotions and considerations women must go through when considering what to do about an unwanted sexual encounter.
By acting like a pig, Mr. Will totally undermined whatever legitimate points he had to make and made the conversation all about him.
Whether that’s a failure on his part or not, only he knows.
