There isn’t much of anything that I agreed with the Trump Administration about, but I think they got at least one thing right. His Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, rolled back Obama era “guidance” (read: “mandate”) to strip those accused of sexual assault or harassment on college campuses of their fundamental rights.
The Obama rules, provided in a “Dear Colleague” letter, but short of actual legislation or formal rules, suggested that any school that received Federal money (basically, all of them) had to tip the scales in favor of the accuser. The standard of proof was reduced to “a preponderance of the evidence,” the accused could not question the accuser, and one person could function as both investigator and judge.
And it expanded the definition of sexual harassment to a ridiculous extent. As staff writer Emily Yoffe wrote in The Atlantic, “It resulted in a radical inflation of the definition of sexual misconduct on campus to potentially include virtually any sexual encounter—from behavior that could meet the criminal definition of rape, to jokes and unwanted flirtation. And schools, desperate to avoid displeasing federal Department of Education investigators, established Title IX procedures that flouted the rights of the accused.”