DEAN OF SEXUAL ASSAULT: How The Sexual Assault Campaign Drove One Student Affairs Administrator Out Of Her Job:

My job, upon hearing of a situation (whether or not it was heading to a conduct hearing or a report to law enforcement), was not to take sides but to remain as clearheaded and objective as possible. Calling myself Dean of All Students — the accused and the accuser — was my reminder to myself as I began the process of overseeing the institutional response: the investigation, the support, the parents’ questions, the community outcry (if there was one).

I didn’t investigate: I deployed skilled people to do that. I didn’t advocate: I assigned staff to those roles. I didn’t judge: I relied on smart, thoughtful, compassionate colleagues to find whatever truth might be there in the midst of accusations and counteraccusations.

My job was to protect a process that often felt like it was under siege by parents, lawyers, friends of the students involved, faculty and staff members who had an interest in the case. I stood at the figurative door and held off all those who would interfere, impede or otherwise compromise a process we had worked hard to create, so that my colleagues could do their work and my students could be treated fairly. . . .

Then the world started to change. The community in which I did my work was breached by those on the outside who understood very little of what my day-to-day work entailed. In 2011, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights sent a Dear Colleague letter clarifying its expectations for how we were to handle sexual assault.

I read the letter, nodding at some parts and shaking my head at others. It felt like a group of well-intended but misinformed interlopers had shown up to tell me how to do a job I had done for years. Absent any input from people in jobs like mine, this group of lawyers and policy specialists created a blueprint for an already existing structure, disregarding the years of effort undertaken to build it. We needed some renovation. They were requiring a gut rehab.

Why did this happen? There were institutions that had not treated their students well, and quite possibly there were some incompetent people at the helm of those institutions’ efforts. But many of my counterparts and I had been doing the hard work of managing these cases for years and knew a lot about what worked well and what needed changing. Didn’t our judgment, our input, count for anything?

No, it’s a war on men.