Stanford University was under the gun.  Its alumni were outraged threatening to withhold donations. What could cause the graduates of an elite school on the wrong coast to feel such anger?  Results that didn’t confirm their bias.

Moreover, Stanford’s chosen methodology and presentation of data produces misleading results. For example, Stanford has made much of the finding that just 1.9% of its students experienced sexual assault, but the 1.9% figure averaged together the experiences of men, women, and gender-diverse students. Similarly, the 1.9% figure — as well as other statistics — is derived from a considerably narrower definition of sexual assault than the definition used by the AAU survey and most of our peer institutions. Under Stanford’s definition, some behavior that would constitute a felony would be classified as “sexual misconduct,” rather than as assault.

These and other problems seriously undermine the value of the survey in addressing sexual assault at Stanford.

Everyone knows there’s an epidemic of rape and sexual assault on campus,  Rape is more prevalent on campus than in prison. Everyone says so. Everyone. Except the damn empirical survey. This cannot stand, say the alums. There must be rape, so there can be rules and procedures to prevent rape. If there’s no rape, than whatever will they do?

It’s not that Stanford’s administration and faculty didn’t understand the problem, and the depth of feelings. And they did the best they could to calm things down.

“Nearly 40 percent of our undergraduate women experience a nonconsensual sexual violation – nearly 40 percent,” [President John] Hennessy said. “That is disgraceful. We have a serious problem. We have documented it, and we must aggressively address it through education, prevention, support and adjudication. We need to get on with changing our culture and educating our community.”

But see the carefully crafted language?  Not rape. Not sexual assault. Not sexual violence. Instead, the 40% applied to “nonconsensual sexual violation.”  Basically, make up your own rules of what constitutes consent and sexual violation, using whatever definitions (no definitions) tickle your fancy, and then create a meaningless number that confirms the bias of the audience. Big tummy rubs all around.

But the faculty knew it was empirical nonsense. And a biology prof called out the malarkey.

Students had proposed and resoundingly approved an ASSU referendum calling for Stanford to use the AAU (Association of American Universities) Campus Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct. However, Susan McConnell, a professor of biology at Stanford, described the AAU survey as “a mess,” saying its questions were poorly worded, confusing and complicated.

“We are now hearing from our peer institutions that they regret using that AAU survey,” she said.

Is this meant to suggest that top colleges and universities are beginning to realize that they’ve allowed their confirmation bias to undermine their intellectual honest? Or better yet, that they’ve used phony empiricism* to further their agenda of redefining the nature of sexual relationships?

Jennifer Widom, a professor of computer science and of electrical engineering, said she was sympathetic to students who felt “belittled” when their experiences were labeled “sexual misconduct” rather than “sexual assault” in the Stanford Campus Climate Survey.

“We all agreed that ‘sexual assault’ was used a little narrowly, following the law, and that was probably at the heart of what has gotten people upset,” she said. “So let’s focus on exactly what the problem is and really narrow in on that and solve that. The resolution does exactly that.”

There is a core problem that has been reflected in the statistical fear-mongering, promoted on every campus and by people in high political office, from Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who has been shameless in lying to anyone who will praise her, to Vice-President Joe Biden and President Obama. Students and academics so desperately want rape and sexual assault to be pervasive, so they can “fix the problem,” that they feel compelled to make the problem exist.

By untethering the words from definition, and instead offering “climate surveys” that leave it up to the self-selected respondents to express their feelings, vague and conclusory, rather than factual information, they can achieve the numbers desired to confirm that women on campus are far more likely to be victims of sexual violence than, say, people in prison or women in the Somalia.

Essentially, if you ask,

Has anything that might in any way be related to anything sexual whatsoever, from a look to a word to a touch to an imaginary fantasy that never actually happened, but felt as if you actually experienced it, ever happened to you that made you feel sad or uncomfortable in the slightest?

Get an affirmative response and call it sexual assault, and BOOM!, you’ve got a rape epidemic.  The survey that Stanford refused to use produced the results that Stanford students and alumni wanted. The survey it used produced an unacceptable outcome, only 1.9% of Stanford student experienced sexual assault. Not 20%. Not 40%. Just a measly 1.9%. That is unacceptable.

What’s a college to do when the numbers not only fail to bear out the claims, but prove them to be absurdly false? Even though it’s Stanford, not exactly a slacker school, they still have to acknowledge two things: first, that they adhere to the orthodoxy that new norms of interaction must be created where acceptable conduct adheres to the sexual fantasies of consent, before, during or after, without regard to any definition of conduct. Second, they must appease their very angry constituents, both student and alumni, by spinning empiricism to match bias.

So, even if there is only a 1.9% incidence of sexual assault, there is a 40% incidence of sad feelings. And isn’t that enough reason to construct a fantasy world?

At Stanford, the Office of Sexual Assault & Relationship Abuse Education & Response (SARA) promotes healthy, empowered and consensual relationships at Stanford.

Stanford has been working to enhance its support, education and training programs related to sexual assault. In spring 2015, the Provost’s Task Force on Sexual Assault Policies and Practices recommended a series of measures to improve campus support, prevention and education efforts. In January, the university announced a pilot adjudication process for sexual assault cases.

Forget the diversion of money and attention from the archaic mission of education toward the fashionable mission of promoting “healthy, empowered and consensual relationships.” Forget the harm to some students to appease others that comes of “a pilot adjudication process for sexual assault cases.”  Forget that an effort at a legitimate empirical survey produced results of 1.9% where a survey crafted to produce an epidemic performed its function perfectly.

There may be no epidemic of sexual assault at Stanford, but who cares? They’ve got all the mechanisms in place as if there was, and isn’t that really the important thing?

*Few academics have the guts to discuss the particulars of the AAU survey, and why it produced such intellectually dishonest and absurd results.  K.C. Johnson does so at Minding The Campus.

The AAU’s 2015 survey, which my colleague Stuart Taylor strongly critiqued, returned a figure suggesting that the campus sexual assault rate was roughly the same as (and perhaps even higher than) the rape rate in war-torn areas of the Congo, where rape is used as a weapon of war.

What’s the purpose of a survey if activists already know the result they desire? It clearly isn’t to discern information. Instead, the goal at Stanford—just as with Gillibrand and McCaskill—is to generate apocalyptic figures, which then can justify the diminution of due process.

Reliance on empiricism is a good thing, to the extent it’s valid. When empiricism is abused to achieve desired results, it’s as dangerous as junk science in the courtroom. That so few academics share K.C.’s integrity and intellectual honesty reflects very poorly on the Academy and the tool of empiricism.