AS VP JOE Biden Rewrote The Rules of Sex Culture on College. Now He Lives in the World of Accusation That He Created
In the past few days, Biden’s not-yet candidacy has been rocked by accusations of unwanted touching. Joe Biden is now living in the world of accusation he helped to create. It is one of peril for the accused, in which they are subjected to expansive definitions of sexual misconduct and little benefit of the doubt. Biden helped to bring it about as the leader of the Obama administration’s cornerstone effort to end sexual assault at colleges and universities, a worthy undertaking that quickly spiraled into overreach..In April 2011, Biden and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the release of a bombshell letter, with the bland greeting “Dear Colleague,” to the country’s 4,600 institutions of higher education. It laid out new directives for how campuses were to root out and punish sexual assault. The accused were to be judged under the lowest standards of evidence, the definitions of misconduct were widely broadened, third-party reports could trigger an investigation even if the alleged victim did not think there had been a violation, and more. Title IX is the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in education. Under Obama administration insistence, college offices tasked with administering Title IX became vast and powerful bureaucracies, and students were encouraged to report any perceived violation.
Among the cultural shifts orchestrated by the Obama administration was the assertion that evaluation of campus claims of sexual harassment and assault rest on the subjective feelings of the accuser. That meant it was irrelevant whether the accused had an intention to abuse, harm or offend. The Obama administration expanded the definition of sexual violence to include compliments, or the kind of touching—often unasked for, and sometimes unwelcome—that Biden has engaged in for years. Because of all these edicts, accusations that emerged from consensual encounters, false reports or trivial contact have resulted in investigations and sometimes severe penalties for accused young men. (I wrote about some of these cases in a series in the Atlantic and another article in Slate.)
Biden, a fervent advocate of affirmative consent, has not asked for permission from the people, often strangers, he touches. He has just assumed his touch is welcome. Biden has also failed to acknowledge that male students punished under the system he helped to create have been increasingly fighting back. They have filed more than 400 civil suits, contending that they have been unfairly accused and deprived of their rights. These suits have been getting increasingly favorable—sometimes outraged—rulings from judges. In a recent City Journal article, historian KC Johnson points out that “Biden responded with fury to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’ attempts to create fairer procedures for adjudicating campus sexual-assault claims.” Biden also seems to have no recognition that campus encounters can be filled with ambiguity and mixed signals. In an April 2016 speech at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, he mocked the idea that sexual assault allegations might be “complicated,” and told the assembled students that they should “ostracize the abusers” and “make them the pariah on campus.”
If Joe Biden were a college student, the very stroking, smelling and touching he now characterizes as “expressions of affection”—ambiguous as those actions might be—could easily result in his being investigated by the Title IX office, and subjected to education-disrupting punishment.
