Today's San Francisco Chronicle carries an op-ed by Boalt law professor Linda Hamilton Krieger, the discrimination expert to whom Dwyer's accuser tearfully revealed her tale. Krieger announces that it is time to move beyond the "sordid details of the encounter to whether the situation was in some way symptomatic of deeper structural problems with Boalt's approach to sex discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual assault" and she congratulates Berkeley for doing just that. The chancellor's office is now reviewing Berkeley's policies, procedures and training programs.

Krieger's argument is that "'the system' failed miserably" in this instance, and that it cannot be allowed to do so again. To that end, she outlines the sorts of questions the university community needs to be asking. First of all, she contends, the university must identify anyone who knew of Dwyer's "propensity to engage in risky sexual behavior" and determine why they did not speak up when he was appointed dean. Second, the university should consider amending the Faculty Code of Conduct to ban--or at least discourage--relationships between students and faculty in the same school or department. "We're beginning a new chapter in Boalt Hall's story," Krieger writes. "It's time to let go of the questions we can't answer, and under the leadership of our new interim dean and with the university's broader support, move on to answering the questions we can."

This is slick work indeed. What Krieger is saying here is that it doesn't matter what happened between Dwyer and his accuser two years ago. No matter what happened, she argues, it was wrong; moreover, no matter what happened, it was abusive. Krieger subscribes to the Catharine MacKinnon school of thought on this issue, and questions whether there can ever be truly consensual relations between a man and a woman when one is a faculty member and one is a student: "Given the tremendous power imbalances between students and faculty, and the psychological transference so often present in the student-teacher bond," she asks, "can sexual relationships between students and faculty ever be truly 'consensual,' particularly in a gender-stratified environment like that at Boalt Hall?" This is a rhetorical question as far as Krieger is concerned. It's clear enough that her answer is "no."

This assumption that there can be no such thing as consent between a student and faculty member does two things for Krieger. First it allows her to define whatever went on between Dwyer and his student as a form of sexual abuse. This in turn renders moot the question of whether the accusation is fair or true: in Krieger's logic, as long as something happened that night, something abusive did. Second, it allows her to define the university that does not recognize the inherently abusive nature of student-faculty relations as itself abusive and discriminatory. She follows her query about consent with one that reveals a great deal about her agenda here: "And why is the environment at Boalt still so gender-stratified anyway?" This is another rhetorical question. Though Boalt's student body is 60% women, though Boalt women have their very own private lounge (the men do not), and though there are good reasons why fewer women than men have been hired by Boalt in recent years, Boalt is nonetheless an inexcusably "gender-stratified" environment. As she notes elsewhere in her article, "Sexual harassment or exploitation is not just about sex; it's about attitudes toward women more generally." Clever, that: within this logic, one isolated, aberrant event reveals the hidden, perverted truth of the culture in which it occurred. It's not that Dwyer made a huge mistake one inebriated night two years ago, but that UC Berkeley's is a culture of harassment that enables and even encourages predatory behavior in men.

I've been suggesting since the Dwyer case broke that there is a political agenda behind it. Krieger's article both supports that claim and begins to clarify the nature of that agenda. Krieger's is a world where all men are potential abusers and all women potential victims, where harassment is consequently everywhere, all the time. Hers is a world where men must be policed and where women must be protected, where no one, in other words, can be trusted to take care of themselves or to respect others. As a consequence, she would have Berkeley attempt to legislate the private lives of its faculty and students; unable to imagine a community of responsible men and women who are free to follow their hearts and their consciences, she seriously believes that it is the university administration's business to protect grown adults from themselves by making rules about who can fall in love with whom. Never mind that such rules would not have made a whit of difference in the Dwyer case. What Dwyer is to Krieger is an opportunity: to push for policies that would render male-female relations on campus even more fraught than they already are, to institutionalize, via policy and training, the beliefs that sex is about power, that all men are dangerous, that all women are childish (Krieger plays this up, representing Dwyer's accuser as weeping in her office and as barely making it through her graduation), and that heterosexuality itself is, ultimately, a very problematic, very sexist thing in its own right.

It's always an interesting sport to try to decide who is using whom. The accuser contends that she was used by Dwyer. But the opportunism doesn't end there. The accuser has used the media to ruin Dwyer. And Krieger is using her former student's tale of woe to advance her ideological agenda. Strange bedfellows indeed.