Dr. Nicole Bedera

I'm so excited to be here.

What's it like to be in the New York Times?

The first time I was in the New York Times, it was because I wrote an opinion piece about campus sexual violence.

And it was in this moment, if you think about the recent history of Title IX, we have the Obama administration who comes in and basically says, we're going to enforce Title IX for really some of the first times ever in a really big way.

There'd been all of these laws and regulations on the books that universities had been ignoring, and Obama said, we're going to do something about it.

And so there was all of this renewed effort and excitement around Title IX.

And then Trump took office.

And one of Trump's big campaign promises was to reverse all of that and to say, we're going to go back to the way things were before or worse, where Title IX either will not be enforced or it will be used to punish survivors.

That was the moment when I wrote my opinion piece for The New York Times was after the Trump administration had taken power and they put out their draft of how they wanted to change the way sexual assault was handled on campus.

It was a wild experience for so many reasons, including that at the time I was still a graduate student.

I was in my second year at the University of Michigan.

I'd had my master's at that point.

So I wasn't super, super fresh into grad school and research.

But I think a lot of people thought I was too fresh to be able to talk about these types of things.

And so that played a role.

A lot of people who just thought, step to the side, you don't have a right to talk about this, which I thought was interesting, given that students are some of the primary victims of sexual violence on a college campus.

In some ways, you'd think that would make me more credible.

But I really saw the gamut of responses.

I saw people who were

worried about what was happening, who cared about it very much.