It turns out that there’s a critical constituency that is getting fed up with campus extremism on Title IX — mothers. From the Washington Post:

In the course of a year, Sherry Warner-Seefeld went from high school teacher to activist promoting fairness for students accused of sexual misconduct. Explaining why, for her, means revisiting a night of shock and a phone call she will never forget. She was grading social science papers on a cold, late January evening in Fargo, N.D., when her cellphone rang, she told The Washington Post. It was her son, Caleb Warner, calling to tell her he had heard from a dean at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks. A woman with whom he had had a short sexual relationship, the dean told him, had accused him of sexual misconduct, of nonconsensual sex, that she alleged had occurred on the night of Dec. 13, 2009. The charge was filed after the winter break in January 2010, his mother said, after he had “made it clear to her that he was not interested in having a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship.” Then out of the blue this notice arrives, with its intimidating legal language.

Of course large-scale campus attacks on the rights of young men leads to blowback — and not just from conservative reformers who’ve long critiqued campus radicals. It’s hard to imagine a single mother who wants to see their son’s future sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Moreover, these mothers can’t be written off as tools of the patriarchy:

The experience inspired her to co-found, with other aggrieved mothers, an organization called FACE (Families Advocating for Campus Equality) designed to assist other parents who received similar phone calls and, bewildered and scared, don’t know where to turn. The FACE website features commentary critical of what’s happening on campus when it comes to sexual misconduct, cases drawn from the news media and from the courts, among them a critique of the film, “The Hunting Ground,” an editorial from the Los Angeles Times headlined “Can colleges handle sexual assault cases fairly,” and an advocacy piece from the John William Pope Center called “Title IX: How a Good Idea Became Higher Education’s Worst Nightmare.” “FACE,” the site’s mission declares, “provides resources and support information for wrongly accused college students and their families who are caught in the present system. We reach out to lawmakers and decision-makers in our quest to change a system that serves no one adequately and leaves the havoc of unjustly dismantled lives and ruined futures in its wake.”



Cowardly colleges increasingly find themselves between a rock and a hard place. They nurtured radical feminism until it became mainstream, and now those radicals run the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. OCR imposes unlawful standards on colleges, the universities are too frightened of their own internal constituencies to challenge those standards in court, and now aggrieved students (and their parents) are launching their own form of legal retaliation — filing suits accusing universities of gender bias against men. Here’s Harvard Law School’s Jeannie Suk Gersen:

In April, 2015, Columbia University’s motion to dismiss one such lawsuit was granted by a federal district court in New York, which seemed to spell doom for these kinds of claims. But, last week, a unanimous Second Circuit appeals panel reversed that decision and held that the accused student could go forward with his claim that the university subjected him to sex discrimination in violation of Title IX. The case will go back to the lower court for trial proceedings, unless Columbia settles with the student, who is seeking damages and wants his disciplinary record scrubbed. Across the country, state and federal courts have recently decided for other accused students who claimed that their schools’ procedures were unfair. Last August, in a case against Washington and Lee University, a federal court in Virginia found that the plaintiff had “plausibly established a causal link between his expulsion and gender bias,” and that his claim could go forward. (The school settled with the student.) In February, another Virginia federal court ruled that George Mason University, a state school, had violated constitutional due process by reversing a decision, which was originally in a student’s favor, without explanation or notice of some of the factual allegations for which he was expelled.

Universities can’t sustain this level of anti-male animus — at least not without overhauling even the relatively liberal federal judiciary. When colleges conduct sexual assault tribunals the way feminists demand, they systematically violate men’s rights. Courts can’t permit that level of blatant bias without upending generations of precedent — including precedent that has bleed-over effect into off-campus issues. Through it all, the tales of injustice multiply — and so do the angry moms:

There’s Judith Grossman, an attorney, whose son, she writes on the site, was accused by a woman “more than two years after the breakup of their relationship.” There’s Allison Strange, who signed on after her son’s February 2012 expulsion from Auburn University. “Blindsided by the absurdity of the process to which he was subjected and blatant disregard for his constitutionally guaranteed right to due process,” she writes, she and her son seek “to affect change in the way college administrators handle” sexual misconduct. And there’s Jean Barish who describes herself as “the mother of a college son who was unjustly accused of sexual misconduct by his college.” FACE in turned spawned a second group, called Save Our Sons, run by Alice True, who on her site recounts her own experience after her son — whose name and school she withholds to protect him as his case move through the courts — was expelled.


Feminists may not like men all that much, but mothers sure do love their sons. And in that bond there is hope — at long last — for sanity and justice on campus.