It would take the combined talents of Judd Apatow, Margaret Atwood, and a parish priest to make meaningful sense of this episode and its punishment, but we will forge ahead with only the facts as Roe presented them in her court filing. (I spoke with the University of Cincinnati spokesman Gregory Vehr, who invited me to stop by next time I was in Ohio to see all of the great things that were happening on campus and emailed me a statement: “The University of Cincinnati focuses on the well-being of our entire university community and makes every effort to provide an equitable process that respects everyone’s rights and accommodates their needs. Due to federal confidentiality requirements, we cannot address the specifics of any individual case. Our goal, as an educational institution, is what’s best for all of our students in terms of safety, equity, and support.”)

By some kind of weird alchemy involving the sum of its parts, this strange little event manages to hit upon almost every troubling aspect of the way that these cases are interpreted and punished on the contemporary campus. It proceeds from the assumption that if two drunk college students make out, one of them—and only one of them—is a victim of the event. It resulted in a fairly common but extremely severe consequence meted on students found guilty of very minor offenses—banishment from the university until the complainant graduates. And it suggests how easily the system can be manipulated by a student with an alleged grudge.

It is Jane Roe’s good fortune to have as her attorney Josh Engel, whose practice is largely centered on suing universities—including, on five occasions, the University of Cincinnati—on behalf of plaintiffs who faced discipline for sexual misconduct by campus disciplinary proceedings—all of whom, until now have been men. In the lawsuit, he cites a recent and underreported ruling from the Sixth Circuit, which has significant relevance to the large number of campus sexual-assault proceedings involving two drunk students. Doe vs. Miami University found that a school acts in a discriminatory manner when it finds that both a male and a female student are intoxicated and engage in sexual activity yet chooses only to discipline one of the students.* As Engel told me, “From a constitutional standpoint a public school violates the equal-protection rights of their students when there is no rational basis to differentiate between male and female students. The court found that even if only one student makes a report, if the school possesses knowledge that both were intoxicated, “the school has an affirmative obligation to investigate both students for misconduct without waiting for a ‘report,’” Engel said.

In other words—college students and administrators take note—the days of blaming one person (almost always the man) for a no-harm, no foul, mutually drunken hook up may be coming to an end. It was a ridiculous standard, one that that infantilized college women, demonized male sexuality, and was responsible for harsh punishment meted out to an unknown number of college students, almost all of them male. It trivialized something grave: sex crime. And because it poured all of these experiences through an interpretive system that forced women into the role of passive victims and men in that of aggressive predators, it has helped stoke understandable resentment among young men on campuses across the country.