AS PROMISED, Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has pitched herself further into the fraught politics of campus sexual assault. On September 22nd, she announced that she was rescinding Obama-era directives to universities on how they should investigate and adjudicate sexual-assault claims. The move provoked fury. Patty Murray, a Democratic senator from Washington, said the education department was “continuing a pattern of undermining survivors’ rights”. Catherine Lhamon, an official who helped write the reversed regulations, said “this backward step invites colleges to once again sweep sexual violence under the rug”. Sofie Karasek, co-founder of End Rape on Campus, an advocacy organisation, said the intent of the rules was “to protect those who ‘grab’ by the genitals and brag about it”.

Such claims seem to ignore the fact that the original guidance had a number of deep flaws. First, it was issued without a formal period of notice and comment, meaning that it lacked the force of law. Two documents, a letter sent in 2011 and 50 pages of question-and-answers issued in 2014, instead scared colleges into compliance by threatening their access to federal funds. The old regulations also stated that Title IX, a federal law passed in 1972 prohibiting gender discrimination, required that campus-rape procedures be judged on a “preponderance of the evidence” standard, or more than 50% certainty of guilt, instead of demanding “clear and compelling evidence”, which requires a “high probability” of guilt. And worse, the tribunals hastily assembled by universities often failed to provide basic due process protections to the accused—a right to review and address the evidence gathered against them, and to receive an independent, impartial judgment.

So what do the newly promulgated rules say? They allow, but do not require, universities to use the “clear and compelling” evidentiary standard. End Rape on Campus says this gives “a default advantage to perpetrators”. It seems extreme, however, to expel a student with a 49% chance of innocence. More important are the due process guarantees provided by interim procedures that will be in place until the final rules are issued. The new guidance requires universities to provide the same information to both parties, give equal access to procedures (only one side cannot receive the right to cross examine or have a lawyer present), and ensure the decision-makers do not have conflicts of interest. The Title IX offices that made decisions in some schools often had a vested interest in keeping a university in the good graces of the federal education department, while others acted as advocates for the accused, calling their impartiality into question. All these are eminently reasonable suggestions.

The rules also allow students to settle their case through mediation, which the old rules strangely forbid, if they voluntarily agree to it. In their haste to criticise the guidelines, activists have, perhaps wilfully, misrepresented this rule as a requirement that rapists force their victims into a room with them. There is little reason to believe that the interim guidelines will even force changes to the administrative policies of most universities. Indeed, the criticisms of Ms Devos’s reforms are generally light on specifics.

The response to the new rules reflects the tribalism of campus sexual-assault politics—an issue that ought to be free from partisan bomb-throwing. Some conservatives caricature advocates for victims as snowflakes; activists too often tar critics of Title IX as chauvinists. In fact, the most prominent and compelling critics of the policies have been law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, who have provided much of the thoughtful critique of the Obama-era policies. Given the antics of her boss, Ms DeVos’s reforms were always going to attract criticism. But that does not make them any less necessary.