Campus Rape: Scholars Accused of Misconduct for Politically Incorrect Findings

Of course, the claim of “misconduct” will eventually be found to be baseless. But until that happens, the authors will have to endure a tedious “investigation.” The process is the punishment.

Ironically, Mary Koss is one of the people responsible for the current hysteria about campus sexual assault. Her pioneering study in the 1980s, financed by Ms. Magazine, claimed that one in four college women have been victims of date rape. The number was entirely bogus.

Koss’s study had serious flaws. Her survey instrument was highly ambiguous, as University of California at Berkeley social-welfare professor Neil Gilbert has pointed out. But the most powerful refutation of Koss’s research came from her own subjects: 73 percent of the women whom she characterized as rape victims said that they hadn’t been raped. Further—though it is inconceivable that a raped woman would voluntarily have sex again with the fiend who attacked her—42 percent of Koss’s supposed victims had intercourse again with their alleged assailants.

So one could view her current troubles as poetic justice. We think this would be unfair, and credit her with being honest about the data in spite of the current politically correct dogmatism.