If the crime is serious, the accused is guilty! Or, When law becomes politics and politics administration

Comment published on New York Times blog in response to opinion article by Ronald S. Sulllivan, Jr., “Why Harvard was wrong to make me step down,” June 24, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/24/opinion/harvard-ronald-sullivan.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage#commentsContainer:

Our representative government system enshrines at certain levels an idea shared by any functioning democracy worth the name.  Not only are you entitled to take your own opinion and walk away, but matters of truth or justice can effectively be pursued when participants not only use reason, but allow other claimants to make their case.  

The university need and must not hold a reasoned discussion as to whether or not Weinstein is guilty.  Legal matters of guilt for violating laws are not decided by arbitrary votes.  And defeating vocal foes on reason's grounds is more potent politically.   

The hyperpoliticization of our culture depoliticizes.  This happens when everyone "knows" they are right and you wrong.  Politics becomes competing efforts to persuade (not think) and so a discursive civil war.  

Students at Harvard and other citizens elsewhere need a way to insist that what such men are accused of doing is very wrong.  That is the only real issue here of popular concern.  

Something has gone horribly wrong when it is common for people to think that a person is guilty, or more so, if the crime he is accused of is serious.  

Indeed, is not the depoliticization through social justice wars itself linked to the shift after 9/11 away from rule by law and towards rule by the authority of persons (like police and others in power)?  At universities, a shift towards massive administration points this way, as students in a culture of victimhood complain to it.