Dr. Nicole Bedera

Quite the opposite is true.

What people are really saying when they say that is that we have accepted that universities violate people's civil rights, and so we don't hold them accountable.

And so we act

as if survivors have no rights, but survivors do have rights.

Women do have rights.

What I saw instead was that the university was willing to take on a huge amount of legal risk to protect perpetrators because they considered them to be valuable members of the institution.

You're probably thinking of the star football player or a really famous professor or the child of a donor.

And yes, all of those people are some of the people who are protected.

But one of the things that we find is that universities use gender as a proxy for power.

They are not interested in building a system that protects only the most wealthy, powerful, favorite men on campus.

Because if they make a mistake and they penalize one of those men, that could hurt the institution.

If universities were just protecting the powerful, there were survivors I interviewed who should have been protected.

They were also the children of donors or the children of famous professors.

And it wasn't enough for the university to step in because gender is the only proxy they use.

That's part of why my answer is so simple.

It's just about gender.

Because every time I look to any other variable that should have been explanatory, gender was the only thing that made sense.

I think that there were way fewer exceptions than I would have hoped.

We would all hope that if something happened in a feminist class or if it happened in a department that had a lot of women in positions of power, we would hope that that would change things.

But it didn't.