To be fair to victims, must we be unfair to those they accuse? Note on the campus sexual assault debate

Comment published in New York Times online blog, in response to John Kracauer and Laura L. Dunn, “Don’t weaken Title IX campus sex assault policies,” August 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/opinion/weakening-college-sex-assault-policies.html?comments#commentsContainer

Universities have two obligations here:

1) To protect students from being raped.

2) To do this through efforts that include removing from campus any and all students found guilty of rape or sexual assault.

There is no fair way to achieve the latter without finding the person guilty in a proper way. It is not a mere matter of civil liability. It is if someone violates a contract involving money or goods. But if a person commits an act of bodily violence, that is a crime. The use of the civil standard of preponderance of the evidence can never be appropriate in what are effectively criminal matters, even if it is a private corporation or organization like a university and not a court of a governmental jurisdiction that is deciding. It is effectively guilt. Imagine: You have been found to have committed a sexual assault, though it is by preponderance of the evidence and not a truly decisive determination, meaning beyond a reasonable doubt. So you apply to transfer to another university. On the application they ask, have you ever been suspended or expelled from an academic institution for misconduct? "Yes," you reply, "the university found that I had committed a rape, only they were not certain." 

Anti-rape feminists often make these kinds of slippery arguments these authors do in their sloppily argued piece, claiming that it is unfair that courts have a presumption of innocence, and in not assuming the man is guilty, the woman is again wronged. Wrong.