Campuses across the country kicked off “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” (SAAM) this April to the tune of several hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since 2001, every U.S. President has declared April to be SAAM, and President Trump has followed suit. Over the past decade in particular, an increasing number of Federal mandates encouraged colleges and universities to up the ante on such awareness programming, enforcing punitive measures should they fail to do so. This suggests an observation: Those who believe that an increased Federal role will solve campuses’ well-documented sexual woes might be suffering from something akin to April foolishness.

It’s not simply the bureaucratese-heavy emails that flood my inbox from consulting companies—designed with “best practices” in mind and in collusion with lawyerly types—that influence this observation. (Though it’s been several years since I worked as a student affairs professional, the industry likes to remind me of all the ways I, or my institution, should continue to fund their existence.) The headlines of the past few months alone are enough to give one pause about throwing more regulations, more lawyers, or more courts at campuses’ sex-related problems.

So does the lived experience of working in student affairs, at the nexus of competing student needs, parental demands, faculty expectations, legal obligations, and public opinion.

The situation on college campuses is well summed up by a recent flurry of articles and books. For a representative sample, take Stuart Taylor, Jr. and K.C. Johnson’s “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities,” or Northwestern University Professor Laura Kipnis’s riveting Chronicle Review article, “Eyewitness to a Title IX Witch Trial,” an excerpt from her own recent book. The latter is not so much about Kipnis’s own surrealist encounter with Title IX enforcers as it is about her erstwhile Northwestern colleague Peter Ludlow, now effectively unemployable and living in Mexico. About American campuses, Kipnis observes, “Rampant accusation is the new norm.” About everything, she adds—but particularly about sex.

This commentary and the furious discussions it engenders feature the usual bêtes noires: Title IX, the Obama Administration’s “Dear Colleague” guidance letters, and campus administrative hearings. The consensus is that the Trump Administration ought to rescind the Obama-era directives, that Title IX ought to be re-tethered to its original purpose by Executive Order or Congress, and that colleges ought to be required by Federal mandate to hand over any sex-related incident to the criminal courts. Doing these things, so the reasoning goes, will restore proper due process and sanity to college campuses.

Doubtful.

For starters, Title IX is an ice cube beside the iceberg of campus-related regulations. Colleges are bound by numerous Federal laws even more aggressive, intrusive, and elastic than Title IX. These include the Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, the 2015 Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act (SaVE) amendment to the Clery Act, and the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which has added its own conditions to the distribution of Federal student aid. The procedures, programming, and public reporting required by these laws is in addition to, and in frequent contention with, the separate legal requirements of such Federal regulations as the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) Privacy Rule, Title IX, Title VII, and Title IV.

SaVE, for example, requires colleges to report when any student on a public (non-university-owned) sidewalk experiences “emotional distress” directly or indirectly because of another student.¹ In addition to requiring procedures and programming, these laws also restrict what university administrators can and cannot say about allegations of sexual violence—to whom (including off-campus police) they say it, about whom, and when.

Because these laws treat the alleged victim’s privacy as inviolable, the university is not allowed to identify, defend, or condemn him or her in any way, however much said victim or the accused broadcasts his or her side of the story. These laws do not mandate the same privacy protections for the accused. Because these laws empower the victim to choose the course(s) of redress, the university is not allowed to bring the case to outside police for investigation unless the victim has specifically requested it. And if the victim wants the university to drop whatever investigation or case it has against the accused, it is supposed to act accordingly—even if friends, parents, professors, or public opinion demand it do otherwise. Should the victim wish to involve the police, the academic institution still has to conduct its own separate investigation—just as any private business would conduct an internal review of an employee who allegedly violated its policies by committing a crime.

In sum, university officials are already following numerous Federal processes. So it’s well worth being skeptical of calls for the government to become even more involved in colleges’ internal processes. How much more entrenched in university life do we want it to be?

The situation on campuses isn’t only a product of Federal meddling, however; the colleges’ own policies and personnel more than contribute. University administrators are bound by the published “Code of Student Conduct” of their schools. Almost every student signs a form acknowledging that he or she has read the university’s code and will abide by it—a typical requirement for formal admittance to the university and class participation. Universities in turn are required to make public the “judicial processes” they will use in the event of a violation of the code (and every university must include sexual violence among the prohibited behaviors). Typically, this is laid out alongside the conduct code.

Academic institutions pay numerous lawyers and compliance officers, most of whom have been well steeped in “best practices” seminars, to design their specific judicial processes in consultation with faculty, staff, and student committees. This is all done to ensure that the institution has a judicial process that is fair to accused and accuser alike. However, these best practices are informed by a decades-long tradition of social justice advocacy premised on liberal or leftist assumptions about the nature of justice. Frequently, this tradition ascribes a person’s wrongdoing not to his or her own agency, but to any host of adverse circumstances, including ignorance. Thus, the “punishments” handed down by campus judicial processes, even for severe conduct violations, have frequently taken the form of “education sanctions” and community service.

Complicating matters is the fact that leveling fines or harsher sanctions is unpopular in student affairs circles, as it brings down the (frequently public) wrath of parents and any faculty advocates who hear only one side of the story. (FERPA seals the lips of the officials who know all of it.) If the matter draws wider negative publicity, the university’s president might be forced to step in. At this point, under pressure to show that the institution is “doing something,” the relevant officials often reverse course or overreact, applying or ignoring sections of the conduct code at will to save face within a social media-determined timeframe.

In addition, it’s not just the campus judicial process that’s influenced by left-leaning ideologies; student affairs professionals as a group are stridently progressive and unabashed about it. Just as certain judges and justices sometimes do, student affairs professionals may deliberately (though also sometimes lazily or ignorantly) violate their institutions’ published processes in the name of “justice,” because they do not think that these processes will produce the desired “message.” For example, if a straight female is sexually assaulted by her lesbian roommate at a typical American university, the victim stands a good chance of being instructed by a student affairs professional that she simply misunderstood the situation—and of receiving “educational sanctions” to rectify her own discriminatory, judgmental reaction.

This is not new to 2017, nor in itself a product of campus personnel scrambling to respond (however ham-fistedly) to Obama-era “Dear Colleague” letters. Such attitudes were shaping campuses with the implicit approval of cultural elites as well as attendees long before the Federal government involved itself in enforcing them.

While perhaps the universities were in the vanguard, the “sex problem” has since spread from the campus to the public sphere. We can speculate endlessly on the “why” of this. Perhaps one simple explanation lies in the fact that graduates who lived in such an atmosphere have now been members of the workforce and policymaking discussion for several years. But because it has spread, it’s unlikely to be solved anytime soon.

For example, nearly two decades ago, the listservs, discussion boards, and seminar sessions of the professional student affairs industry were filled with agonized handwringing about bathrooms. If an anatomical male was found in a restroom for anatomical females, could the former actually be found guilty of any wrongdoing if he said that he had decided that he identified as female for the day or afternoon or hour, no matter what he was actually doing in said female restroom? The strong consensus was that in such a case, the student affairs professional had no right to tell the anatomical male he hadn’t been a female for a random hour, and should drop any case against him.

This past month, the NCAA lifted its six-month ban on holding championship events in North Carolina after the state’s legislature and Governor repealed the “bathroom bill.” Said the N.C.A.A., frostily, about North Carolina: “[It has] minimally achieved a situation where we believe N.C.A.A. championships may be conducted in a nondiscriminatory environment.” What student affairs professionals haggled over on the internet more than a decade ago is now a polarizing issue in everything from legislative chambers to shopping malls to athletic courts.

Speaking of courts, consider a recent ruling by the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Judges Diane Woods and Richard Posner did some “judicial interpretive updating” (Posner’s words) in order to revise the 1964 Civil Rights Act ban on employment discrimination on the basis of “race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” to include sexual-orientation discrimination. The decision “updates” the meaning of “sex” from the definition Congress might have used in the not-so-distant past to what it needs to mean today, because “a broader understanding of the word ‘sex’ in Title VII than the original understanding is…required in order to be able to classify the discrimination of which (the plaintiff) complains as a form of sex discrimination.”

Of course, college administrators perform this same Kabuki dance about law and the meaning of words to arrive at the en vogue interpretation of sex. Sex is the casus belli in politics and culture; both the campus “courts” and the Federal courts are merely the beachheads.

For decades, we have blithely advocated the unrestricted right of personal autonomy, while also demanding that we not be held responsible for any ill effects. More than that, we want the law to facilitate our autonomy and smile on our choices. And humans invariably seek retribution, if not justice; we want victims to see their oppressors punished. Ironically, these demands require the interference of the authorities from which we proclaimed our freedom. The campus and the courtroom are much closer than they appear. And neither will restrain the other so long as the court of public opinion remains conflicted.