Rest for the wicked

These are not the palmy days for the transgressors among our nation's educators. This will happen when the marketplace of ideas gets caught out behaving like, well, just a marketplace.

And so Iona College is running for cover after hiring a basketball coach whose previous regime is now doing the NCAA perp walk. Meanwhile, the Association has landed on Kansas' basketball program with army boots, declaring Bill Self's Jayhawks dirtier than mud volleyball on a rainy day.

"Egregious," is one of the words the NCAA threw out there. "Severe" made an appearance. So did "significantly undermine and threaten the NCAA Collegiate Model" -- although that Model isn't really what the NCAA likes to imagine it is.

In any case, the bad guys are on the run. But as the mob lawyer said to his client, "Don't sweat it, Bugsy. I got this."

And so here comes the Secretary of Ed-you-cay-shun, the spectacularly unqualified Betsy DeVos, riding in to save the day.

You might have missed it while Anthony Fauci, Bill Gates and Elvis were shooting at JFK from the grassy knoll, but DeVos this week took a hammer to Obama-era expansion of Title IX regs that gave victims of sexual abuse on campus greater protection to come forward. The supposed logic behind this is of course financial -- the Trump administration says the rollback would save schools beaucoup bucks if they were required to investigate  fewer sexual misconduct cases -- and also that it will streamline the process and make it fairer and more transparent for both accused and accuser.

This all sounds lovely until you start looking at how this sausage was made.

A for-instance: The new Title IX regs will allow the accused to cross-examine the accuser through a third party in live hearings. They also no longer require coaches, athletic directors or other university employees to report allegations to the Title IX office -- presumably part of the streamlining process.

This doesn't mean coaches, ADs and other university employees still can't report allegations. They can. And they may be compelled to by other organizations.

But absent that ... well, you can imagine a football or basketball coach at some high-dollar program deciding it wasn't his problem to report an allegation against one of his star players, because, you know, the marketplace. Why risk missing out on a chunky bowl payday, or Da Tournament, if you don't have to?

The upshot is by streamlining the process, forcing survivors to be interrogated by their assailants' proxies in open court and narrowly defining what constitutes sexual harassment, you make it even more unlikely survivors will come forward. And they were mightily reluctant to do so anyway -- particularly if their alleged attacker was a major cog in the university's mighty athletic money machine.

See: Art Briles' football program at Baylor. See: Jameis Winston at Florida State, who dodged the bullet because his accuser couldn't get anyone to take her seriously in Seminole Nation. See: Jerry Sandusky at Penn State, who got away with abusing young boys for years because Joe Paterno had football games to win.

Maybe DeVos sincerely believes what she says about taking sexual harassment on campus seriously, and maybe it's just the usual boilerplate word salad. Either way, unintended consequences are pesky things. And it's not hard to imagine they at some point will raise their heads with a vengeance.

It's not hard to imagine, in the end, that all DeVos really has done here is clear the runway for more Winstons, Sanduskies and Larry Nassars to skate. A "W" for the bad guys, in other words.