| Here are some highlights from that article of KC Johnson's (from http://www.mindingthecampus.com/2014/06/if-she-had-drinks-yo... -- your call as to how mainstream Minding the Campus is): > Broadening what constitutes sexual assault by redefining consent has been a principal goal of “activists”—who have worked with sympathetic faculty and (increasingly) the OCR. The McLeod case at Duke is a particular obvious example of how the new standards might function: two students were drinking and had sex, after which the university concluded that the male student, Lewis McLeod, had committed sexual assault because the accuser could not give consent. Why? Dean Sue Wasiolek explained: Even when both students consumed alcohol, “assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.” As that standard is actually illegal, it's rare to see it admitted to so openly. > Minding the Campus staff examined the alcohol-related policies of U.S. News & World Report’s 55 top-ranked universities. The schools fall into three categories: those that bypass the issue entirely; those that link sexual assault to the incapacitation of the victim; and those, troublingly, that have such a vague definition of consent to almost certainly be arbitrary. > The majority of the top schools—32 of the 55—employ an incapacitation standard. [...] A few of these policies, such as Berkeley’s, Rochester’s, Yeshiva’s, and Penn State’s, have some vagueness, but reasonable people would construe them as not suggesting that having a drink in and of itself can prevent consent. Yale’s language—“consent cannot be obtained from someone who is asleep or otherwise mentally or physically incapacitated, whether due to alcohol, drugs, or some other condition”—typifies this group. This standard is similar to that in criminal sexual assault cases. > That leaves 18 of the U.S. News top 55—roughly one-third of the total—that avoid this standard. Instead, at these schools, at least in some instances, a student can be branded a rapist if a college disciplinary panel, by a preponderance-of-evidence (50.01 percent) threshold, determines that the accuser was intoxicated. I feel comfortable having characterized about 1/3 of schools as "various schools". > Six of the schools have internally contradictory policies, referencing the incapacitation standard regarding alcohol consumption, but then modifying it elsewhere in the university’s own policies. > Dartmouth also claims to punish only according to an incapacitation standard, but then suggests that the “use of alcohol or other drugs can cloud people’s understanding of whether consent has been given (or even sought). A ‘yes’ from an individual who is under the influence of alcohol or other drugs may not necessarily mean ‘consent.’” Obviously an incapacitated accuser could not (by definition of the word) say “yes.” > At William and Mary, consent “can only be given by someone in an unimpaired state of mind who is able to understand what is happening; consent is not valid if the party from whom consent is sought is impaired by the use of alcohol or drugs > Wisconsin is unique among the 55 schools, in that it explicitly recognizes claiming sexual assault as a way for a student to avoid facing campus charges for alcohol offenses (Not directly relevant, but pretty amazing, no? Might this lead to any less-than-clear-cut charges of rape?) > Readers who follow the issue doubtless will notice that many schools in this third category of broadening the way in which alcohol can be used to establish a student’s guilt (Brown, Stanford, Duke, Dartmouth, Columbia) all have checkered records regarding general due process in campus sexual assault cases. > Two final thoughts. First, even at the third group of schools, obviously every time two intoxicated students have sex, the male student isn’t brought up on campus charges. But at many of these institutions, the role of alcohol in establishing consent is so vague as to at least, on paper, deem as rape acts that few outside of campus would consider sexual assault. > Second: given the efforts of “activists” to broaden the definition of consent, it’s likely that three or four years from now, there will be many more schools in the third category, making it more likely that more innocent students will be brought up on charges. |
It puts scare quotes around "activitists" for goodness sake. That doesn't even make sense.
I don't see anything particularly shocking in your quotes, yet it's all written as if I should. For example, a "yes" from a sufficiently drunk person, may not count as consent, even if they're not literally unconcious. That doesn't sound particuarly extreme to me. In fact I'm more worried about the schools that apparently require incapacitated to mean unconscious since I've seen plenty of people unaware of what was going on due to alcohol, without being literally passed out.
So we've arrived at a solid definition of "drunk" at least, as this article makes clear that if you've not literally passed out, then they consider you capable of giving consent to sex. That's not the line I'd choose, but if you continue to argue for this, please just state that up front so overyone knows where they stand.