The hysterics over “sexual assault”on campus have reached the point where an autistic student has been suspended from a college for hugging a woman. Hans Bader provides the details in this piece.

“Sexual assault policies,” he writes, “should protect people from violence and unwanted intimate invasions, not relatively harmless activities that simply lack advance authorization.” Certainly, but the authoritarian control-freaks behind this mania can’t draw such common sense distinctions. It’s similar to the “no tolerance” policies we now find with regard to anything even vaguely resembling a weapon. Students can get thrown out of school just because someone happened to see a kitchen knife in a parked car.

Ah, but perhaps this incident will set off a battle between interest groups since, Bader observes, colleges also have to comply with the administration’s broad interpretation of the duty to accommodate disabled students and that “Draconian punishments of students can sometimes themselves violate Title IX or other laws.”