Magical thinking about rape allows people to believe in a world that is basically good and wholesome and safe. Why is society so ready to sympathize with the perpetrator and disbelieve the rape victim? Believing that the perpetrator is innocent, or that he is in the thrall of drink, or that he is basically well-intentioned and guilty only of making a harmless mistake, all these are forms of magical thinking. The campaign has gained epochal momentum under Donald Trump, who called the Department of Education “massive and it can be largely eliminated.” Magical Thinking The attack on Title IX marks the ominous culmination of a coordinated campaign four decades in the making by a coterie of free-market activists including the Koch Institute, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the Foundation For Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Earl Ehrhart, the DeVos family, and the Goldwater Institute, among others. As Dean Kevin Helmkamp admitted: “We are locked into a system that is about the rights of the accused.”ĭeVos’s move was not a solo decision. But as Natalie and I discovered, the Wisconsin process was entirely biased in favor of the accused, the unequal rights codified in Chapter 17. Opponents of Title IX like DeVos persistently claim, without offering evidence, that Title IX is biased against the accused. In a trenchant speech, DeVos argued that the Obama administration had used “intimidation and coercion” to force colleges to adopt measures that robbed accused students of their rights. Dana Bolger, co-founder of Know Your IX, warned that DeVos’s decision would leave survivors “virtually without protections on campus.” But in September this year, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, moved to rescind the Title IX protections, precisely those rights that allowed Natalie and countless others to continue their education without constantly facing their perpetrators on campus. In 2011 the Obama administration, shocked by sexual assault statistics, had sent a “Dear Colleague Letter” to campus administrators on how to comply with Title IX.
We won the expulsion only by tenaciously appealing to Natalie’s civil rights under Title IX, the landmark gender equity law. Natalie and I entered a surreal labyrinth of institutional betrayal, cover-ups and attempts by the deans to silence and stall us. During a harrowing process that ground on for six months, the Wisconsin deans insisted they had an official “philosophy” of not expelling rapists. A few years ago, a student of mine, Natalie Weill, and I won the first expulsion for rape in the history of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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