This wasn’t some theoretical exercise. “After my son received notice that he had been accused of rape I went to the top-tier university he attended and in my first meeting was told he should leave voluntarily because there was no possibility that he could ever be found innocent,” one father wrote me. (I omit his name so as not to stigmatize the family.)

His son passed two polygraph exams attesting to his innocence. It made no difference. “I was naïve and thought there was no way this could happen in the United States,” the father added. “Now my son is forever marked as having committed a sexual assault.”

Kimberly Lau, an attorney at Warshaw Burstein, has represented over 100 defendants in campus sexual-assault cases. She described to me sitting with a client in a campus tribunal where she was forbidden from speaking. The accuser appeared via Skype but did not face the accused.

“They are requiring these 19- or 20-year-old kids to advocate for themselves,” she says. “They have to speak about a very private event to three strangers, generally much older. Their whole education is at stake. You can’t expect even an innocent person to feel comfortable in that situation.”

I asked Lau how many of her cases were ultimately resolved through exoneration or a financial settlement. She estimated about 90 percent. But that, she adds, is the good fortune only of those who can afford high-powered representation. “You can’t imagine how many people can’t afford it and don’t even try.”

The travesties of justice carried out under the new Title IX guidelines have been the subject of some excellent books and superb journalism, none better than Emily Yoffe’s in The Atlantic. And yet the response of the progressive left has been indifferent or worse.

On Thursday, the social activist Amy Siskind tweeted that the conservative writer David French should “STFU with your hackneyed due process talking point” after the latter pointed out that “campus kangaroo courts violate fundamental rights.”

Siskind’s activism revolves mainly around pointing out the Trump administration’s creeping authoritarianism. Yet Trump’s election was itself a response to the creeping authoritarianism of his predecessor. Liberals trying to grasp what happened last November would be well served revisiting this ugly saga, and perhaps even murmuring a word of thanks that Secretary DeVos means to bring it to a close.