When Betsy DeVos became U.S. education secretary earlier this year, survivors of sexual assault and their advocates at UC Berkeley, Stanford and other Bay Area colleges worried that the progress they felt they’d made under the Obama administration would deteriorate.

Related Articles CSU universities expected to choose a new chancellor next week

UC Berkeley to take part in resurgence of research in psychedelic drugs

Recently hired CSU professor admits pretending to be a person of color

Coronavirus rates soar in college towns as students return to campus

Why some Asian Americans are on the front lines of the campaign against affirmative action At the same time, students who say they’ve been wrongly accused wondered if they might get a reprieve from policies that they argue are stacked against them.

This past week it all came to a boil when the conservative DeVos invited people on both sides of the issue to Washington, D.C., to hear their perspectives. “No student should feel like there isn’t a way to seek justice, and no student should feel that the scales are tipped against him or her,” she told reporters following the meetings.

“She clearly cares about the issue,” said Jonathon Andrews, a former student at Hanover College in Indiana who participated in the meeting and says he was falsely accused of sexually assaulting fraternity brothers.

The school found Andrews not responsible in one case, but responsible in the other, so he was expelled. The latter case involves a frat brother who Andrews alleges actually assaulted him.

In 2016, under the Obama administration, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into Hanover’s handling of the case.

For the 23-year-old Andrews, the possibility that DeVos will rescind Obama-era guidance that colleges should use a “preponderance of evidence” standard rather than the higher “clear and convincing” standard in sexual assault cases is encouraging.

But for students like Meghan Warner, a Ph.D. student at Stanford who was sexually assaulted as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, the possible recision of the guidance is “terrifying.”

Warner and other advocates for sexual assault victims are angry at DeVos for her handling of the issue. By meeting with both victims and people who say they’ve been wrongly accused on the same day, “it seems like a 50-50 issue,” she said.

According to the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women, studies have found only between 2 and 8 percent of accusations are false.

“I was incredibly disappointed,” Warner said.

So was Hayley Krieger, a UC Berkeley junior who says she was sexually assaulted during her freshman year. “I just don’t think it’s appropriate to be meeting with people who have such a victim-blaming mentality,” she said.

Advocates for sexual assault victims were also disappointed by a comment that Candice Jackson, the U.S. Education Department’s top civil rights official, made to the New York Times. “The accusations — 90 percent of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right,’” Jackson said.

She later walked backed the comment, but the damage was done.

“That is disqualifying,” said Michele Dauber, a law professor at Stanford. “She should absolutely be terminated.”

Jackson still has her job, and DeVos gave no clear indication how she plans to act on what she heard during the meetings. But Dauber thinks the writing is on the wall.

The office Jackson heads is in charge of policing how schools handle sexual assault cases, making sure they follow federal rules correctly. But, Dauber said, “Here’s what they’re saying: We’ve decided to roll back the police force.”

Under Obama, the Education Department also began publishing a list of schools under investigation for their handling of sexual assault cases, which advocates said increased transparency around the issue. But the department is considering whether to continue publishing that list after hearing from campuses that see it as a “list of shame,” Jackson told the Times.

Advocates for sexual assault victims worry that such changes would create room for schools to backpedal on some of the enforcement policies they instituted during the Obama years. Stanford, in particular, Warner said, seems to be “kind of waiting out the storm.”

She said she’s concerned the school will look at any policy shift at the federal level and “take advantage of that and continue to have really crappy policy.”

In a statement to students, Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Provost Persis Drell said, “While it would be premature to speculate on possible changes in federal guidance or policies, we want to affirm that keeping our community safe for everyone to learn and work is a core value.”

But other victims’ advocates say there’s been such a strong movement among students and faculty to pressure schools to do more for victims that schools will have trouble shifting policy just because they technically can.

“There’s going to be a significant fight because we’re not going back,” Dauber said. “Ultimately social change doesn’t happen because of laws. Social change happens because of social activism.”

Dozens of Stanford students recently published an open letter to Tessier-Lavigne, for instance, urging him to commit to upholding the Obama-era guidance regardless of what the Trump administration decides.

At UC Berkeley, said Marisa McConnell, a senior who has advocated for victims, students have moved policy in the right direction in the last several years.

The school has made it easier to report assault and created more services for victims. “A lot of that progress has to do with the negative publicity and students getting upset and angry with how they’ve been repeatedly ignored,” she said. “I think the UCs have really stepped up these last few years.”

But Andrews, the former Hanover student who says he was falsely accused, hopes DeVos will be able to find a balance between supporting victims and giving those who have been falsely accused a chance to prove their innocence.

“If she does something,” he said, “I think it’s going to help both victims and the falsely accused.”