Since the release of Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, a recurring theme in public disagreement regarding the book has been that if critics believe the book is in error, they should be specific, and provide evidence, while critics were hesitant to do so when it seemed that would only further violate the privacy of those depicted in the book. Whether or not there were errors in the representation of events at Northwestern may be adjudicated in a more appropriate venue than blogs and Facebook now, anyway – but one thing I’ve found odd about this dynamic is that there are errors in the book about matters of public record.
Consider this passage:
“In 2011 the Department of Education’s office for Civil Rights (OCR) expanded Title IX’s mandate from gender discrimination to encompass sexual misconduct (everything from sexual harassment, to coercion, to assault, to rape), issuing guidelines so vague that I could be accused of ‘creating a hostile environment on campus’ for writing an essay. These vague guidelines (never subjected to any congressional review) take the form of what are called, with faux cordiality, ‘Dear Colleague’ letters—note the nebulously threatening inflections of overempowered civil servants everywhere.” (p. 36 of Unwanted Advances)This is false. The 2011 Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) is controversial — but it’s not because it expanded the scope of Title IX to include sexual misconduct. Title IX already covered sexual misconduct. Rather, it’s because in that letter, OCR issued guidance that schools should use the preponderance of the evidence standard when adjudicating sex discrimination complaints, including complaints of sexual misconduct.