What a pleasure to hear some sense on this issue, and framed most elegantly within the wider question: "What are our universities for?" This highlights the moral, the intellectual, and the institutional failure, all in one. Why are our universities crowded with extraneous organizations, many of which are engaged in victim-manufacture? Patronage politics: the enemy of honesty and friend of vulgarity.

Cheers to Ms. Mac Donald for this one!

An excellent article and exposé of thinking that is perhaps more tawdry than the behavior it seeks to understand. It's about time someone called them out. I am sharing this with all of my academic friends. Not that many, unfortunately.

I've worked for three years in a civilian capacity for a college-town police department. One thing for which I was unprepared is the amount of alleged sexual assaults that have arisen from the hookup culture rampant among a certain age group on and off college campuses. I can attest to the resources spent on taking reports from and investigating alcohol-fueled, morning-after, regret-filled sexual encounters. One recent example involved a victim who enjoyed an off-and-on again "friends with benefits" relationship with a fellow student who, on this occasion, prior to their liaison, had made it explicitly clear thru text messages that their visit that night would be solely for sex. She later learned that he allowed at least two friends to watch in the dark, from his closet. No charges of unlawful sexual contact (possible if being "peeped" or if one is subjected to a flasher) could be brought forward, however, because the "victim" is still hoping her friend will come around and that it will evolve into "the real thing."

There are too many other similar instances to note--such as the young woman who only reported her sexual assault after finding that her electronics had been stolen from her apartment by the visiting non-students with whom she and her roommate had engaged in consensual group sex. She intimated to officers that she assumed her crime would get higher police priority if a sexual assault was added, despite having first called 911 for the robbery.

Your article on the sexual violence industry is very much needed. At DePaul, we have all of it: take back the night marches, the Vagina Monologues, the clothesline display, the marches against sexual violence that parade through classroom buildings disrupting classes. Last spring, there was a demonstration outside of the Student Center; one of the demonstrators held a poster attacking a column in the student newspaper that suggested that the Duke lacrosse players had been unfairly treated.

I stopped by and got in a conversation with a freshman girl. I asked her if she believed that one-fourth of the women at DePaul had been raped. She assured me that the statistic was correct. I told her that it wasn't credible. There are fewer than 10 sexual assaults a year reported at DePaul. By her reckoning, at a school with some 15,000 female students, that means close to 1,000 rapes a year. Even if she is referring only to the 5,000 female undergrads, it would still mean on average close to 300 rapes a year. It might be true that half the women are too traumatized to report the rapes, but it is unlikely that only one in thirty would report that they were raped. Your article pretty well explained the statistics.

There was a real rape two years ago. A stranger climbed into the dorm and raped a female student. After he was captured and his picture was shown in the papers, the head of Women's Studies wrote a letter to the school newspaper complaining that his picture shouldn't have been shown because it stigmatized blacks.

There was a rape in the building that housed the Math department. It was committed late at night by a homeless person. Our building was connected to the rectory of St. Vincent DePaul Church, where the homeless were provided meals. As a result, there were homeless people on the grounds much of the time, sometimes engaged in arguments. Also, there was often the smell of urine near the vending machines. One of the homeless committed the rape at around 10 pm, when I believe a graduate student was working late at her office.

I have talked with people who have been attacked, and they are quite traumatized by the experience, particularly because their lives are threatened. If what the women's studies faculty is telling their students was true, our students would be on 60 Minutes. (There was a 60 Minutes story recently on women who have been raped in Africa).

What they are saying is disturbing. But what is completely insane is that you can't object to it. They are able to continue to expound the most vile lies about men, and it is considered not only acceptable but laudable.

We are having discussions about our rules governing speech. A task force to consider questions of free speech vs. offensive speech is reporting its guidelines. They will reflect on our current policies, which include anti-harassment policies. Unfortunately, our current policies divide the world into binary categories: the protected and the unprotected. Women are protected, men are not. Blacks are protected, whites are not. Gays are protected, straights are not.

I am on the Faculty Council, and we had a report on the guidelines. There was a discussion in which there was some dispute about the background concerning the task force and also the implications of the guidelines. One person who was not on the task force but is a member of something called the President's Diversity Council, and who is opposed to the guidelines, made a long statement complaining about the guidelines and the composition of the task force and the usual complaints about attacks on people of color. I responded by saying that the task force was not set up to protect victims of offensive speech, but in reaction to differing views about the conflicting aims of protecting free speech and protecting people from being offended. I also offered my own opinion on the subject, including a sharp criticism of our current harassment policies. I said that they allowed people in the protected classes to say anything, no matter how offensive, while any criticism from the unprotected was a potential case of harassment. I added that I found the policy itself very offensive.

When the minutes of the meeting were sent out, my comments were eliminated, the woman from the Diversity Council was portrayed as having an official role in the matter (she didn't), and the entire point of the task force report was obscured. I sent an email to all members of the Faculty Council complaining that the minutes were not an accurate record of what had occurred at the meeting, and I explained in detail what had been left out. I got no support, and when the minutes came up at the next meeting, they were simply accepted with no discussion of any kind.

I think that my story tells the real reason for this insanity. It empowers women and some minorities on campus in all matters. It means that they are not subject to the same standards for promotion and tenure, they get favored in assignment to committees, their status as members of protected classes is a criteria for merit in yearly salary evaluation, that they receive favorable consideration in all hiring decisions, and so on.

People who think that the whole edifice of preference will collapse from its own stupidity are sadly mistaken. The logic of the situation is that it only gets worse, since the more outrageous the demand for favoritism, the more outlandish must be the claims of mistreatment. What can be more legitimizing than lurid tales of 300 rapes a year? Since real rape is an awful crime, as virtually everyone agrees, what could be more effective in silencing male voices than claiming that the rather dull life of faculty is some kind of playground of sexual violence?

Keep up the good work. You are a voice in the wilderness on this one.

This was an article that I couldn't stop reading. The unspoken treaty between the sexual revolution and feminist movement for the sake of liberalism is destroying our young people and creating, quite frankly, a disgusting society. Both sides are obviously victims. What is sad is that men are being accused of rape when they give into the seductions, and women are putting themselves into positions of being raped (or in the very least putting on the slut label).

Also unfortunate is that the military is just behind the universities in its idea of rape. The Uniform Code of Military Justice has guidelines for married individuals (married military members who have affairs can be charged under the UCMJ), but there is little regulation for singles. While the military doesn't offer "better sex" courses, it does have condom handouts and rape classes. In the latest Air Force rape video, we are shown a staged scenario where a girl gets really drunk, goes out with a guy, and is then "raped." We are told in our tech schools that if there is anything less than a verbal consent we are to stay away. Still, there aren't big orgy parties.

The low number of rapes within the military is, however, given the same type of excuses. The Air Force is taking measures to assure victims of rape that they will not be humiliated, and that if they feel that they were sexually assaulted or raped in any way that their accusations will not cause reprisals. The Air Force believes that fear of reprisal is the reason that frequency of reported events don't match their pre-supposed numbers.

I am a woman and, for five years, was a campus investigator (administrative, not law enforcement) for reports of sexual assaults by students against students. I fully agree with your conclusion that rape on campus is exceedingly rare. I also agree that anyone trying to remain a neutral finder of fact can find themselves, as I did, vilified by those who believe that all reports of rape are true and everyone accused of rape is a rapist.

I was shunned by those who despised my practice of referring to women who reported rape as complainants rather than victims. I was accused by a complainant of dereliction of duty after I concluded that rape was not a sustainable charge when she offered her anus to a man and he ended up in her vagina instead--and she admitted he immediately apologized for his mistake.

One complainant demanded I find a way to hold a young man accountable for intended rape because he would have had sex with her if she had not vomited on him and caused him to leave the area in disgust. I had many more complainants such as these and I tried, from my neutral position, to educate them and others on campus about the lifelong impact of false charges against another. Without fail, the complainants who asked me for such findings had been whipped into a frenzy for revenge by the rape industrialists or their acolytes in the student body.

I thank you, Ms. Mac Donald, for the reasoned and researched arguments you make in all your books and articles. I hope some day your honesty and integrity will rub off on all writers. Hey, that might be a great pursuit for the "gangs of 88" on every campus--get back to the classroom and teach truth, ethics, and the paths to finding them both.

I'm sure that you are getting lots of negative responses and press from this article (I actually discovered it from a link on Feministing.com, which trashed it) so I wanted to say, Thank you! This is an awesome, incredibly accurate article and I'm glad somebody wrote it.

I went and listened to the William and Mary webpage's audio clips featuring voices saying how sexual assault had affected them. Ms. Mac Donald wrote that she was puzzled that so many of the voices were male, but I think there's really no mystery. The voices are actors, and their words are scripted. I think so for a couple reasons: first, the campus rape resources types probably wouldn't use actual rape victims for that kind of public, even though anonymous, exposure. Second, in college I took a semester-long training course required of anyone who wanted to be a Resident Adviser. We spent an entire 1.5-hour class period listening to, I think, four "rape survivors" tell their stories. At the end, there was a question-and-answer period, and one girl in the class raised her hand just to commend the presenters for being so brave as to share their stories. The moderator looked a little embarrassed and then said "Uh, actually these are actors."

It was a surprise to everyone in the class, but the university had set up this program that recruited students to pretend to be rape victims and tell groups made-up stories. I rather doubt they could have found enough real victims, even if the horror of sharing wouldn't have been a hurdle.

I have never in my life encountered an article documenting or lamenting promiscuity among young men.

Instead of publishing screeds chastising young women for their own victimization, the LA Times might consider why there's a movement that seeks to absolve men for raping semi-unconscious women.

We're never going to return to the good old days Ms. Mac Donald so clearly yearns for, thank god. Young people will experiment sexually. The only question is how we can ensure such experimentation happens in a moral and legal way, and to do that, we need to focus on educating young men. It's about time.

I enjoyed your article and agree with your premise about female victimization agenda and organizing it into a campus politics that seriously exaggerates the problem. However, I think you obliquely touched on the real reason feminists want to carry this torch to its utmost extreme and create false hysteria. They want to spread their true, rage-induced, agenda of demonizing all white males, who they believe have caused all of the cultural maladies throughout history.