“If you don’t find a ‘safe space’ for men on campus, I’m gonna have a hard time finding space for your budget.”

A more patronizing political punch line is hard to imagine.

What is hard to imagine is how that line of thought becomes law. It’s easy to understand that good politics isn’t always good policy or that sound-bites aren’t sound bills. But when you follow through with that kind of threat, and punish Georgia’s students and young women for having done nothing wrong, cries for ‘campus due process’ require a little bit of a gut check.

Rep. Earl Ehrhart, Chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Higher Education, has been entrusted by the people of Georgia with the duty of funding our world-class colleges and universities. He, today in the Marietta Daily Journal, admitted he abdicated that duty by slashing a budget request from Georgia Tech for a long-planned building renovation — explicitly in retaliation for Tech President Bud Peterson’s refusal to bend the knee. He has also called for President Peterson’s resignation.

During my time at Georgia Tech, I served on the Library Undergraduate Advisory Board tasked with giving student feedback to the team of university faculty and administration overseeing the Library Renewal Project. The planning dates back formally to 2013, and would bring Tech up to par with other colleges (like UGA) in measurable standards such as average study space per student. This would be done by renovating one of the oldest buildings on campus, establishing a partnership with Emory to store the physical collection, and redeveloping the space to cater towards what most college students use their libraries for: studying, not checking out books.

So it’s especially frustrating for me to see all the hard work the students I worked with, along with the excellent team the school put together, have poured into keeping Tech competitive as it fights to attract the best and brightest — not just in Georgia, but nationwide against private schools like MIT, Cal Tech, and Stanford — used as leverage to advance a political agenda.

If Rep. Ehrhart wanted to raise objection to the price tag, he could have. But instead, he has decided to end the conversation before it began with an attack on President Peterson, who has served the Institute with great distinction, and policies designed to protect Tech students.

There are problems with the current system, and we are definitely ready for a serious discussion on how to fix them. Current federal interpretation of Title IX is forcing colleges to reexamine their sexual assault policies, and there are bound to be some growing pains. The Board of Regents is working to establish uniform guidelines that will hopefully make many of these problems obsolete. And no one can deny that too frequently, due process in this nation comes up short when it tackles sexual assault.

So what kind of due process does Rep. Ehrhart want?

Does he want a crying mother testifying about the pain her son’s expulsion for sexual assault caused their family, like at his House hearing on ‘campus due process?’ Or does he want testimony on matters that are actually relevant to the student’s guilt, which the Board of Regents affirmed by rejecting his appeal?

Does he want to acknowledge that former Georgia State Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears found that Phi Delta Theta had been given due process by a student judicial panel, and that they had been presented enough evidence to conclude that racial slurs had been hurled out the window of the fraternity house at a passerby? Or does he want to stick to his talking point that “the very limited justice the fraternity is now receiving is shining the light on what I still consider a lack of due process?”

This version of ‘campus due process’ is no such thing. It is a political attack on attempts to protect women and minorities, because it gets his name in the papers in a way that appeals to his desired constituency. It doesn’t matter how many victims get put down on the way to a good quote.

The defunding of the library project and his call for President Peterson to resign, however, send a new message. Now, it doesn’t matter if the state’s most prestigious (sorry, y’all) university can effectively serve its students; don’t stand between Rep. Ehrhart’s crusade for undue process and the academic needs and safety of Georgia’s students.