‘How Much Damage Have My Colleagues and I Done?’

The most unsettling weekend of my professional career was spent in a small hotel conference center in the company of people I had never met before and whom I have not seen since. It upended much of what I believed about myself and my profession and plucked me from a path I had traveled for 25 years, depositing me in an unfamiliar landscape that still feels, almost five years later, like a foreign land.

To say a weekend was “unsettling” is no small claim for someone who’d spent nine years as a dean of students on two campuses. Deans of students regularly handle suicides and suicide attempts; drunken fights and subsequent arrests; sexual assaults during large, chaotic parties; students hospitalized after accidents, alcohol poisoning, or untreated chronic illnesses; large, newsworthy drug busts; and hate-filled graffiti on a campus door. For a dean of students, a weekend on campus is considered a good one if, on Monday morning, no one has died and neither a reporter nor a uniformed officer sits on the bench in the hallway awaiting your arrival.

The weekend that changed everything for me took place 2,000 miles from the campuses where I’d worked, two years after I walked away from a title I’d worked years to achieve.

It began with an invitation to speak at an event in Phoenix, a “Meet and Greet” sponsored by a group I was unfamiliar with: Families Advocating for Campus Equality, or FACE. Their stated mission was to advocate for equal treatment and due process for those affected by sexual-misconduct allegations on campuses. I Googled a bit and learned that FACE was started by three angry mothers whose sons had been accused of sexual assault, and, in trying to find resources for their sons, they found one another.

I was surprised, but not terribly puzzled, by the invitation. A year earlier, I had published a piece in Inside Higher Ed called “The Dean of Sexual Assault,” a valedictory of sorts explaining part of the reason I had given up a job I loved but no longer felt equipped to do. The piece was intended as a critique of the politicization of sexual assault at the expense of fairness to all students. All students, I had written, all of my students, each of them a singular responsibility for me.

I wrote the piece for student-affairs professionals who were under siege, battered by lawyers, activists and social-media trolls. Their emails to me in the wake of the essay’s publication were heartbreaking. Many were wrestling with the issues I had raised, and were torn between leaving a profession they loved and staying despite the emotional toll it was taking to hold steady and do the work fairly.

But a second group responded to the piece as well, and they were not at all whom I was speaking to, or for, or about: groups whose efforts focused on supporting accused students. Some were even men’s rights groups who interpreted my piece as an acknowledgment of how the deck was stacked against men. So when I received the invitation from FACE, I was wary. I emailed a journalist I had gotten to know who wrote about campus sexual assault, Emily Yoffe.

“Is it a legit group, or one of those scary men’s rights groups that live on the fringes of the incel world?” I asked Yoffe. I had no interest in aligning myself with the nutjobs out there who think all feminists hate men, who think sexual-assault survivors deserved what happened to them, who contribute to a culture of misogyny and violence.

“That’s not this group,” Emily told me. “They’re mostly parents whose sons — at least as they see it — have gotten caught in the overcorrection.” “Overcorrection” was shorthand that Emily and I used to talk about our shared observation: a shift in how campuses responded to sexual-assault allegations that had eradicated most rights an accused student had to defend himself, to continue his education during an investigation, and to be presumed not responsible until proven otherwise. It was at the core of “The Dean of Sexual Assault,” and had caused me enormous ethical grief.

Did she think I should accept this invitation? She said she thought they’d be a tough, but fair, crowd. If I believed in what I had written, I should be willing to engage in a discussion of it. “But angry mothers,” I said. “I’ve kind of had my fill of them, too.”

“Well, then it should be an interesting weekend.”

I responded to the FACE representative who had originally emailed and asked her, “Why exactly do you think your group wants to hear from me?”

“Our board thinks you seem like you might be a reasonable college administrator. They would like to hear your perspective.” Nothing flatters a college administrator like being called “reasonable.” I accepted their invitation and booked a flight.

A dean of students is always on display. A walk across campus might elicit friendly hellos or quiet grumblings, depending on the student. The job has wonderful perks: invitations to events and organization meetings where your presence is cause for delight; happy parents at family weekends and commencement who thank you for your efforts on behalf of their student; the opportunity to help a student at a difficult time, using our substantial resources to speed up the grinding academic machinery and avert a crisis; connecting someone in need with the person on campus who can actually help.

It is also, at times, a brutally tough job. The dean is often the face of an administration making backroom moves that seem unjust or insensitive to students. An email, a sentence spoken in front of a group, even an answer to a question asked by a student as you walk across the quad — they all have the potential to reverberate across campus, echoing from dorm to classroom to the dreaded Change.org petition, ultimately coming back to ring in your ears for days.

Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle

So, when I arrived in Phoenix, I was reasonably confident that, having been tempered by the fire of angry students and parents for years, the people I was about to encounter, with whom I would have to have no further contact beyond the weekend, would be no match. As the hotel shuttle pulled up to the front door, I felt confident.

I had no idea.

At the front desk, I was given my room key and a packet that had been left for me, including a handwritten note from one of the group’s leaders inviting me to the reception taking place that afternoon out by the pool. An hour later, I made my way to the pool deck where a group had started to gather. I went directly to the bar and ordered a glass of Chardonnay, dropped a dollar in the tip jar, and looked around. I spotted two women off to the edge of the group, looking a bit uncomfortable, and walked over to them, smiling.

Have you ever walked into the wrong classroom or meeting, sat down, and known almost instantly that you were in the wrong place? Or have you ever, perhaps while traveling, asked a question of a stranger only to learn you do not speak each other’s language? Have you ever found yourself in a conversation where you wished a meteor might land nearby and distract everyone so you could exit quickly without your conversation partners noticing? Perhaps all three in the space of 10 minutes?

As I joined these two women, I felt the confidence that comes from years of approaching strangers and taking the lead in a conversation. Their name tags showed just their first names, Teresa and Eileen.

“Hi there! My name is Lee. I flew in from Vermont this afternoon and it’s so nice to be outside in this warmth. Where have you folks traveled from?” They exchanged glances and Teresa tentatively answered, which should have been my first clue that all was not going to go smoothly.

“We’re from New York.”

“Oh. What part?” After all, I’m a New Jersey native and have lived in the Northeast most of my life, so I can talk geographic specifics.

Another meaningful glance passed between them. Eileen finally answered after what felt like about five minutes. “We’d rather not say.”

OK. So this was an answer I had never gotten before. I quickly recalibrated. “Oh, sure. Well. Lots of great parts of New York. So. Um. Have you been part of FACE for long?” And maybe that was the moment when I knew I had totally blown any credibility, and which I’ll blame on being so thrown off by their answer. Because why would they be there? Why would they be familiar with FACE?

To their credit, they did not walk away from me. They stayed and talked, tentatively telling me what had brought them to Phoenix. Their son had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman with whom he’d had a relationship that had recently ended. He was initially found not responsible, but she appealed, something the college had only recently decided to allow. He was then found responsible and expelled, in the middle of his senior year. Hesitant to salt their obviously still-open wound, I tentatively asked, “What was different about the second hearing?”

Eileen answered quickly. “We don’t know, and neither does our son, because he wasn’t allowed access to the second set of case files.”

“That’s not right,” I said.

“We didn’t think so, so we’ve hired a lawyer, but he’s already missed too much school to graduate. And he’s not sure he wants to go back. We found FACE when we started looking online for help.”

Teresa seemed to shift her thoughts abruptly. “What about you? Is this your first FACE event too? What brings you here?”

“Yes. I’m actually one of tomorrow’s presenters.”

“Oh. Which one?” Eileen opened the folder she had laid on the high-top table nearby. She quickly glanced again at my name tag which, like hers, had only my first name, then at the schedule in her open folder. I was listed as “former student-affairs dean.” The friendly tone our conversation had taken, which I felt I had earned with some seriously hard work, disappeared. “Nice talking with you,” Eileen said, and then looked at Teresa. “We should mingle.” And without another word, they walked away, leaving me alone with my now-empty plastic cup.

I could have, maybe should have, continued to interact with others around the pool deck, but I was shaken, both by their story and by their reactions to me. I looked at my phone and saw a text from my friend Linda. “How’s it going there so far?” Linda was provost during my time as dean of students and understood the challenges this weekend presented. From a corner of the hotel lobby just off the pool deck, I hit the “call” icon and was relieved when she answered.

“It’s not that I’m not familiar with being hated by people because of my job title,” I told Linda. “It’s more that I felt so immediately … indicted? And also inadequate.” She made some sympathetic comments, offered another round of encouragement, and we said goodbye.

Maybe I was naïve. Yes. I was naïve. I really believed that my remarks the next day would shed some light on the hardworking, caring people in my profession, and offer a new perspective on fairness and justice. I was so, so wrong.

At the start of the first session the next morning, I took my place in the middle of a row of chairs and settled in as anonymously as I could. The morning’s sessions included a talk by the journalist Cathy Young, who took on the concept of “rape culture” in a way that would have earned her a place on the hit list of activists against campus sexual assault. Her premise was that our campuses have been overrun by second-wave feminists who have turned their academic passions into incubators of activism. As she spoke, I imagined the faces of my former faculty colleagues — smart, capable, committed feminists who indeed create in their classrooms, if not incubators, something of a neonatal ICU for their students’ own passions.

I thought about the specific faculty members I had relied on to serve as advocates, investigators, hearing officers, the ones who willingly gave time and energy to our efforts to stop students from harassing and assaulting one another. Is that who she was talking about? As a dean of students, I had been indebted to these colleagues. Never once had I heard their motives questioned. I certainly had never questioned them. But as I listened to Young, I realized there was a very different perspective out there.

It had never occurred to me that others might condemn their efforts, and as I listened, this counternarrative came into focus as though I were twisting a camera lens. What if Young had a point? What if these feminist warriors, women in their 50s, 60s, 70s, had taken their academic research, turned it into experiential learning, and in doing so, tilted the playing field toward the students, mostly young women, who took their classes? It was no coincidence, Young claimed, that the rise of women’s studies programs on college campuses coincided with the arrival of women’s centers and victims’ advocate services.

“Yes, but that’s a good thing, right?” So asked a troubled voice in my head. I mean, I taught in women’s studies programs. I had started a women’s center on one campus, for God’s sake. I was one of those higher-education professionals that Young was critiquing.

Young’s talk was followed by a session of audience sharing. As I listened, I realized why FACE is so invested in the invitation-only privacy of these meet-and-greets. The stories being shared by these family members would have made great material for either a reporter or a campus advocate to exploit. But that wasn’t the purpose of this sharing. Here, I realized, families found a community of similarly frustrated and angry parents. Those for whom this was their first meet-and-greet spoke about their sons’ campus encounters, and after a few stories, some themes emerged. The woman involved was typically either a former girlfriend, emotionally unstable, manipulated by others, or some combination of these. A second theme: Campus administrators were either indifferent to their son’s version of events, hostile, deceitful, incompetent, or again, a combination of these.

Several parents broke down in tears while describing months — or even years — of hearings, lawyers, suspensions, expulsions, and the cost of therapy and inpatient stays for now-suicidal sons. At the heart of it was a complete loss of faith in the competence and compassion of senior campus administrators, like, say, deans of students.

After the family-sharing segment ended, I headed outside into the hot, dry Arizona morning to regroup emotionally. Sometimes, I had learned over my career, a dean of students has to stand in front of an angry crowd and remain composed. I knew how to be disarming with warmth, or humor, and more importantly, I knew that people wanted to feel heard. I could do this! I would be fine! I breathed deeply and re-entered the lobby.

There were two more sessions before my talk. The first was a panel of lawyers, an articulate and experienced bunch whose names I recognized from media coverage of sexual-misconduct cases that had resulted in lawsuits against universities: Eric Rosenberg, Mark Hathaway, Kimberly Lau. If deans of students have monsters under the bed, they look a lot like these attorneys. In their remarks, they systematically critiqued the many ways colleges have failed in their efforts to be fair, compassionate, and appropriate. I found myself comparing them to the many panels of university counsels I have attended, picturing the two sides facing off, with deans, investigators, and hearing officers caught in the crossfire. The higher up you go on the administrative organizational chart, the fewer places there are to hide when the lawyers — on both sides — come riding into town.

The second panel consisted of five men who had been accused of sexual misconduct on campuses. They each told a story that, like the parents’ earlier tales, was a combination of revenge by a scorned or manipulated woman and administrative ineptitude. They also shared strategies they had used to weather the months of uncertainty, or to recover from what they believed was life-altering and permanent damage. Again, I found myself remembering the many times I have listened to stories told by sexual-assault survivors — the many Take Back the Night marches and rallies I had attended. I wondered, uncomfortably, if I had failed to listen as carefully to the accused men, even though I would have sworn that I was fair and open-minded. I hadn’t heard stories like these in quite the way I was hearing them now — they were punches to my gut.

Several years before, on the small college campus where I was dean, there had been an ugly case involving three first-year students, two males and a female, in which she had accused them of sexually assaulting her. She did not say the sex was nonconsensual, just that she had been intoxicated at the time, and that she now understood that to mean she couldn’t have given consent. Both sides, as is often the case in these matters, had groups of supporters antagonizing the other side, asking to meet with me to share information they thought I needed to know — emails, texts, social-media posts, comments in the dining halls. For several weeks, it felt like a war was being waged on campus. One night, well after midnight, one of the men called me on my cellphone. I must have given him my number in a moment of weakness. He was crying, and close to hysterical.

A group of women had spotted him earlier that evening as he left the library with a friend. They screamed across the lawn, “Rapist! Rapist!” until he was out of earshot. He told me he held it together until he parted from his friend, and then quickly returned to his room where he had begun to pack his belongings, planning to leave. He was mostly packed when he called me. “I don’t want to leave, but I can’t stay here if that’s going to keep happening.” His despair vibrated through my phone as I listened to him try to catch his breath. I told him to come to my office in the morning and we would figure out a plan, and he agreed.

I had no plan, of course, other than to reassure him that eventually the name-calling would stop, which it did. The hearing happened, and neither of the men was found responsible for assault. The hearing board found that all three were very likely intoxicated, and without any other witnesses, there was no clear evidence an assault had happened. The same case, of course, would have had a different outcome if it had been heard several years later when sex-while-intoxicated became a common reason for a finding of assault. But at the time of that case, the ground was just beginning to shift.

That case was also when things began to change for me. I had three first-year students for whom I was equally responsible (at least that was how I saw it), all of them (and their parents) traumatized to some degree by the storm raging around them. I had dozens of other students taking sides, joined by faculty members who wanted to support one of the students.

It was that complex and painful case that provided my first hints of the power that sexual-assault cases had to polarize — and perhaps destroy — community. It was 2010, and I see that year as something of a dividing line. Before then, sexual-violence response was messy, yes, but contained within the parameters of a conduct process. Case law and directives from federal agencies moved our efforts forward in an imperfect, but hopefully positive, way. We learned from every case, from every colleague’s tale of an incident (with details shared over the phone or a glass of wine at a professional conference), from every letter of agreement released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.

What I failed to understand then was that lines were already being drawn, that two sides were forming, and that the tools we had always been taught would help us keep our campuses civil, if not unified — transparency, compassion, active listening — would not be enough to maintain the bonds of community. Of course, I also failed to understand then, the way I do now, that those bonds were both fragile and inequitable. Women, and some men, who had been victimized by sexual predators were not treated fairly or compassionately throughout the long history of coeducation. While I did not agree with the use of the term “epidemic” to describe the incident rate of sexual assault at colleges, I knew it was pervasive and devastating to survivors.

Pat Kinsella for The Chronicle

Maybe if we had been better at responding to accusations, if we had better recognized the deep-seated misogyny and objectification of women on our campuses, we would not have experienced the backlash that came when those women found their voices. Maybe they would not have been so extremely, legitimately, pissed off.

But they were. Emboldened by growing networks of advocates and survivors, fueled by continued screw-ups on campuses, supported by now-tenured faculty in women’s and gender studies, and by well-established women’s centers, survivors’ advocates had risen up and launched an attack on a culture of sexual … permissiveness? Assertiveness? Aggression? A culture that led to too many college students’ having sex either against their will or under circumstances that compromised their judgment.

Their attack extended to the administrators and processes that too often dismissed claims and campus leaders who looked the other way when fraternities hung banners on their houses suggesting women were little more than prey. Or chanting from the sidelines of a Take Back the Night march that “no means yes.” The advocates’ complaints and concerns were reasonable, if some of their tactics weren’t. The trolling and doxxing of alleged assaulters, and the way those activities cleaved a campus in two, were incredibly destructive to any sense of community or shared trust.

The pendulum, of course, started to swing back with the first wave of litigation by accused students who were banned from campus and denied the right to continue their education before even having a hearing. It swung even more when those who were suspended or expelled following those hearings began to question the legitimacy of the processes that had, it appeared, doomed them. Supporting those processes was the mantra, “Believe the woman.” It’s a reasonable demand, coming after generations of women’s rightful grievances at being ignored by the courts, by law enforcement, by student-conduct boards, and even by friends and family. The problem with “believe the woman” as an approach is that it places all women into one utterly credible bucket of complainants, and their respondents into an absolutely despicable bucket of violators. And as any of us who have spent our professional lives working with college students know, it’s not that simple.

In my career, I have known stellar, decent, upstanding fraternity members. I have known selfish and self-absorbed peer advisers. I have known intellectually formidable football players. Lesbian sorority sisters. Sexually adventurous Campus Crusade for Christ members. And when it comes to accusations of sexual assault, I have known both men and women who are brave and honest, and men and women who lie without a moment’s hesitation. So yes — “believe the woman” is a good place to start, but it is not the place to finish. And that journey from start to finish? There are many twists, detours, and roadblocks, but it must be taken. And to do so — to travel that complicated road — is not in itself a dismissal of a woman’s accusation. But many see it that way.

This is how, I think, FACE came to be. The parents I have known throughout my career have generally expressed a common response to an accusation against their son: They are open to his being held accountable. Yes, there have been those parents whose regard for their child rendered them unable to consider the possibility of their child doing something wrong, but those were rare cases. I have sat with parents at the table in my office and showed them evidence of drug-selling (text messages, confiscated contraband, witness statements), vandalism (the student who wrote his actual first name and last initial in fresh cement), assaults or thefts caught on video camera. Parents, at that point, typically drop their eyes to the table, sigh audibly, and sometimes cry, but they generally acknowledge that their kid screwed up.

An accusation of sexual assault is different, and not just because the stakes are high. It’s more, I think, that some of these assault allegations take place in the context of a relationship that the parent has had some window into. An assault that happens at a fraternity party when an intoxicated woman, previously unknown to the assailant, ends up in his bed is one thing. A parent is likely to be as repulsed by that as anyone. But an accusation made by a former girlfriend, a girlfriend that perhaps the parents have gotten to know, invited to their home, added to the Christmas-gift list — that this young woman would, after the end of the relationship, dangle reconciliation at the end of a late-night booty call, or express jealousy of a new girlfriend, or enlist her friends (and his) into a war — this is hard to accept.

Parents would ask me, “Do you know what’s been going on?” and then unspool a tale worthy of the Bravo network. “My son isn’t perfect” (I heard that phrase about once a week), “but his ex-girlfriend is very” (choose one) angry/heartbroken/vengeful/crazy. The possibility that this young woman held in her hands the power to derail their son’s education, something these parents might have been imagining since he was in utero, was untenable. The possibility that the process designed to respond to exactly these sorts of accusations already appeared to presuppose his guilt — that was unimaginable.

No amount of assurance on my part convinced them that their son would be treated fairly. If that were the case, why were they already being told he had to leave campus and his classes before there was so much as a preliminary hearing?

When the group broke for lunch, I retreated to an isolated corner of the pool deck. I read through my planned remarks, my confidence dissipating in the Arizona heat. Did it occur to me to bolt? Yes, actually. I could feign illness — it wouldn’t have been that much of a stretch. But my hubris got the better of me. They would hear me, sense my sincerity, my commitment, my professionalism. They would rise to their feet and applaud, grateful to have finally been heard by a reasonable college administrator!

I probably don’t need to say this, but reader, that didn’t happen.

Sherry Warner Seefeld, one of the group’s leaders, quieted the audience, made a few announcements, introduced me, and I began. “This was an unexpected invitation,” I told them, but I was grateful for it. I told them about “The Dean of Sexual Assault,” and how it described a decision I had made to walk away from this work, and how much of that decision was the result of no longer being able to do the job the way I thought it should be done. They were quiet, attentive. I explained how people in roles like dean of students once did our jobs in anonymity, but now find ourselves named in popular media.

I mentioned the now-discredited Rolling Stone article that named an assistant dean at the University of Virginia (who then became the victim of harassment herself).
I explained how another administrator at the University of Richmond had been torched by an unedited, un-fact-checked hit piece on The Huffington Post’s contributor platform. I said, “We are being named, and then subjected to, at worst, harassment and threats, but even at best, lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking by a general public, by attorneys and activists, by parents and students, who don’t really understand who we are and how and why we do our work. I think it’s important that we have our say.”

Reading these words today mortifies me. In the five years since that afternoon, I have repeatedly heard that defensiveness from other student-affairs professionals, and I know now it’s not what the moment called for. This is not at all to imply that I know what the moment does call for. It’s just that it’s definitely not whining.

I went on to give them an unnecessary disquisition on student affairs, and the professionals who occupy these roles on campus, asking them to believe that, more than anything, we care about our students, which we do, but again: It was not what they were interested in hearing.

Then I tacked. I talked about the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter and subsequent harm done by the Office for Civil Rights. I talked about the grossly unfair expectations placed on student-affairs professionals, and how the Office for Civil Rights had started a fire that was impossible for administrators to put out. (I love a good metaphor.) But the audience was growing restless with my second approach, post-whining: Blame someone else.

Sensing the audience’s unrest, a voice inside my head told me: “They are not buying it, sister. Wrap it up and get out of here.” But I had the dais, my carefully written remarks, and my rational-sounding voice, so I continued — until someone in the audience shouted at me. “You don’t get it at all, do you?” yelled a man from the middle of the room. I stopped, the sound of a needle being pulled across vinyl in my head. I blinked, then continued. I didn’t have a lot of experience with hecklers but guessed it was best to just ignore him.

“How can you defend yourself? Do you even know what you’re talking about?” he shouted again. Others shushed him and he turned on them. “Why do we have to sit and listen to someone defend the very people who have destroyed our sons’ lives?”

“Let her finish,” another called out. And then, silence. I finally croaked something like, “I hope you’ll let me finish, and I might cover exactly what it is you’re asking of me.” My mouth continued to shape and speak the words on the pages in front of me, but the dialogue in my brain was at a loud and frightened pitch. I plowed ahead, ad-libbing here and there to demonstrate that I did hear their incredulity, which was entirely true. I heard it. I was just not sure how to alleviate it.

Finally, I was done. When it was time for the Q and A, I remember the blood pounding in my ears, requiring me to lean forward and lip-read the first question. Surprisingly, my heckler remained silent. I think he had made his point. A hand went up in the corner of the room where the young men — the accused students — had congregated throughout the day.

“Have you ever made a decision that ended up ruining someone’s life?”

I can say with certainty that nothing in my years of education, training, or experience quite prepared me to answer that question, cloaked as it was in a heartbreaking accusation. The question was evidence of a breach in a relationship — between student and dean — that I had come to believe was sacred. I paused for what probably seemed an unreasonable amount of time and finally answered.

“Yes, I suspect I have made decisions that have caused great hurt to students and their families. I hope their lives weren’t ruined, but I don’t know that they weren’t.”

There were a couple more questions, but honestly, I don’t recall them. The session was then finally over and the audience wandered into the lobby for cold drinks on a linen-covered table. I noticed the group of young men huddled in the corner, speaking animatedly with a FACE mother, a couple of them occasionally glancing my way. The one who had asked the question broke away from the group and approached me. “I’m sorry if my question sounded rude.”

“Your question was fair,” I said. “No need to apologize.” He nodded and walked away.

I sat through another session, smiling at anyone who looked at me, but feeling flat-footed and wobbly. When the final session ended, I made a beeline for the door but was intercepted by the mother who had been talking with the men in the corner. I think she was trying to be kind. She said, “I wanted you to know that I talked to the guys after your speech. They had two conclusions.” I stopped and looked at her, like a boxer who drops her gloves to her waist just before the deadly right hook she knows is coming. “The first was that it was the first time they felt heard by someone in your position.” I exhaled. “The second was that the tables were turned — that you experienced what they had been through: telling your story to a room full of people who didn’t believe you. They found that kind of satisfying.” She smiled, her eyes showing some — but not a lot of — sympathy. I thanked her and turned toward the elevator, desperate to get away.

But dear God, it wasn’t over! I had agreed to join the FACE advisory board for dinner that night, and Sherry told me to meet them in the hotel bar. When I arrived, fake smile still on my face, another mother approached me. She asked me what I was drinking (anything, I thought, just make it strong and deliver it fast), then handed me a glass of wine.

“My son’s hearing was a joke,” she said. “He never stood a chance. Do you know that the hearing officer and the investigator are good friends? And that the ‘advocate’” — she practically spit out the word — “they assigned to him was also a friend of theirs? I found them all on Facebook, attending the wedding of the person who is supposed to hear appeals. All friends. I saw them leaving together after the hearing, and in the parking lot of a restaurant heading in together. We decided to eat somewhere else.”

I thought about my colleagues, the small college team I worked with every day. We were friends. We sometimes dined together. We would have walked across campus together after a hearing. It had honestly never occurred to me how that would look to an outsider desperately seeking a fair hearing for her son. In her eyes, the fix had been in. She told me what college her son had been expelled from. I knew some of those people. I knew my counterpart there, knew him to be a highly regarded senior student-affairs professional. I offered no defense, however, because I had none.

There is a quote from the Rev. Howard Thurman that I have used more times than I remember when leading workshops. “It’s a miracle when one man, standing in his place, is able while remaining there to put himself in another man’s place, to send his imagination forth to establish a beachhead in another man’s spirit, and from that vantage point so to blend with the other’s landscape that what he sees and feels is authentic. … To experience this is to be rocked to one’s foundations.”

This woman offered me a hand and pulled me into her landscape, gave me a beachhead from which to turn and look at myself, my profession, my colleagues, and so much of what I cherished. And we looked nothing like what I had once believed us to be. I had been so certain of my integrity, of my commitment to my students, but I had never seen my work through the eyes of these parents or the sons they fiercely defended. Nor had I fully understood how I looked through the eyes of the women who expected support and instead got fairness, two things I thought could coexist, but that looked and felt very different to the recipient. I wanted to be fair, I wanted to be kind, but what if fairness and kindness are mutually exclusive? In the end, maybe all I could claim was perseverance, that I had kept trying to get it right. And then I gave up and walked away, so I couldn’t even claim that anymore.

When I wrote “The Dean of Sexual Assault,” in 2015, I believed that higher-ed professionals occupied a moral high ground in the war against sexual assault. My weekend in Phoenix challenged all of that. I now find myself wondering: How much damage have my colleagues and I done?

Since my final days as a dean, the sexual-assault landscape has continued to change. The pendulum is nothing if not persistent. Cases are heard on campuses, the results are argued over in civil courts. Case law tells deans how to adjust. The Office for Civil Rights refines or refutes those adjustments. Three presidential administrations have stepped in to tell the Office for Civil Rights what to do, multiple lawyers on both sides have struggled to turn those directives into policies. They have occasionally sought input from deans and student-conduct professionals; more often they have left them out. Just about every campus has a dean who, with other professionals, is stacking sandbags against a rising tide of conflict and accusation that threatens to drown any sense of continued trust. We have not figured it out, and, from where I sit — now admittedly in the bleachers — I’m not sure if we ever will.

Not long ago, I found myself on a Zoom call with someone I was just meeting. He said he had read some of my articles over the years, and wondered what I thought about the recent reversal of the Office for Civil Rights’ new campus sexual-assault regulations. I wasn’t completely honest. I told him, “I don’t really think about it much at all, and am just glad not to have to figure out how to once again rewrite campus policy.” The second part of that is true — I’m glad I don’t have that difficult task to manage. But not the first part. I think about it a lot.

I think about those parents, traveling from all over the United States to Phoenix that weekend, in search of someone who understood their pain and frustration. That they had to travel to find that kind of support haunts me. That they had to listen to my words when what they needed was to be heard breaks my heart.

My new Zoom friend replied, “Yeah, probably best to put it all behind you.” And then we changed topics and continued our conversation.

A version of this essay previously appeared on the author’s Medium page.