The stated goal of this policy is stemming discrimination, but the inevitable result will be advancing it, in the form of content based prohibitions on speech. When people demand censorship of "unwelcome" speech, they're usually demanding censorship of the speech that they find unwelcome. They usually seek to silence their political or ideological opponents, not their friends—all in the name of some greater good.

It's easy to understand why federal officials might believe they're on the side of the angels. Their new "blueprint" on sexual harassment, detailed in the University of Montana letter, was occasioned by the University's reported failure to address alleged assaults, on and off campus. The trouble is, officials have focused on stemming insults as well as assaults. They've adopted the popular, "progressive" belief that arguably offensive, unwelcome sexual speech is the moral equivalent of unwelcome, abusive sexual acts and a virulent form of discrimination.

Thus, according to what is now conventional progressive wisdom, equality requires censorship. What is the provenance of this belief? It dates back some 30 years to the feminist anti-porn movement, which equated presumptively offensive sexual speech with sexual assaults and labeled pornography a civil rights violation (pursuant to a model statute conceived by Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin). Critical race theorists advanced similar proposals barring racist speech aimed at historically disadvantaged minorities. In their view, "racist hate messages, threats, slurs, epithets, and disparagement," like allegedly hateful sexual speech, were actual, actionable bars to equality.

These theories did not fare well in court, but they have since flourished in the culture, especially on the left. Today, what was once an extreme, minority vision of equality that relies on censoring allegedly discriminatory speech has been embraced by college and university administrators and a critical mass of mainstream civil rights activists, including officials in the Obama administration.

Administration officials have also embraced popular feminist biases that require us to "believe the victims," reflexively. DOJ/OCR rules require the University of Montana (and, in effect, all colleges and universities) to establish quasi-judicial procedures for hearing harassment complaints that favor complainants: Students accused of harassment are to be convicted in the absence of clear and convincing evidence of guilt, if guilt merely seems more likely than not, under a permissive "preponderance of evidence" standard. (This controversial, low standard of proof requirement was announced in 2011.)

Accused students may even be punished before any finding of guilt; as former OCR official Hans Bader observes, this is potentially an Alice in Wonderland "sentence first, verdict after" system: The DOJ/OCR letter states, "a university must take immediate steps to protect the complainant from further harassment prior to the completion of the Title IX and Title IV investigation/resolution. Appropriate steps may include separating the accused harasser and the complainant, providing counseling for the complainant and/or harasser, and/or taking disciplinary action against the harasser."