It’s ironic that the president Donald Trump most resembles—Richard Nixon—signed Title IX, a short statute declaring that women should not have to experience discrimination in college. Nixon didn’t care too much about that, but progressive legislators had slipped it into the law he wanted to sign, one that let school districts postpone court orders to integrate racially segregated schools by busing. Back in 1972, few could imagine the ultimate reach and transformative power of Title IX. Most visibly, it created and protected equal rights for college women in sports. But it’s also helped expand the whole idea of gender equality, becoming, during the Obama administration, a powerful tool for addressing the issues of sexual assault and rape.

It shouldn’t be surprising that Title IX became a central front in the culture war. If Hillary Clinton were president, the protections of Title IX doubtlessly would have continued to expand. But campus politics were relentlessly and very successfully parodied by outlets like Breitbart. Implicit in Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again was to restore traditional values on college campuses. And so, 45 years after Nixon signed Title IX into law, Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, is on the verge of rolling back some of its provisions relating to sexual assault at universities. She’s slated to make a speech at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law Center on Thursday, at which she may announce her changes.

No president did more to push the boundaries of Title IX than Barack Obama, a Harvard-trained attorney cut from progressive cloth—and, significantly, a man with two daughters. Obama’s Office for Civil Rights wrote a letter to American universities codifying its interpretation of Title IX. The Dear Colleague letter encouraged American universities to punish sexual assault as swiftly and harshly as possible; the logic was that it is a form of discrimination and denies the victim an equal education.

Obama liked to talk about sexual assault as a civil-rights issue, and was also the first sitting president to call himself a feminist, something he attributed to Sasha and Malia. “When you’re the father of two daughters, you become even more aware of how gender stereotypes pervade our society,” he wrote. “You see the subtle and not-so-subtle social cues transmitted through culture.” Accompanying him on his quest was Joe Biden, who, while he may not have stood up for Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, did champion 1994’s Violence Against Women Act, which contributed to great gains in domestic-violence protections.

Power here linked arms with a cohort of millennial activists on campuses, who were interested not only in broadening the definition of rape, but in thoroughly changing sexual culture. Once defined as an attack of physical violence, “rape” was now updated to involve girls who were very drunk, or perhaps even a girl who had felt uncomfortable saying “no” but nonetheless felt violated by the sex she’d had. Biden spoke about this in fierce terms: “It is never, never, never her fault,” he explained. “She could be drop-dead drunk. She could walk across the campus naked. Nobody, nobody, has a right to touch her. Nobody.”

So off they went, arm in arm—the most powerful men in America and radical students so young they could barely enter a bar, including the first group of Yale students who began the trend of victims filing complaints with Obama’s Office for Civil Rights. They’d reported to the government, in part, that pledges from Yale’s Delta Kappa Epsilon, the frat at which George W. Bush was once president, yelled during a march on campus, “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac; I fuck dead women” and “No means yes! Yes means anal!”