I also believe that upending ingrained ideas about what assault is a gun to the head, a stranger, a parking lot and what consent looks like a woman who gives a no really means yes is very messy. And part of the messiness is some students - and yes, usually these are liberal students - over-determining the definition of assault.

Colleges are a unique space in our culture. They're a temporary constellation of humans, like a workplace. And the rules about sexual assault and harassment in a workplace are narrow rules. They're stricter than what's considered criminal on a city street. By this logic, the same rules should exist at universities too.

An interesting reversal is happening right now. The college women who kicked all this off have been superseded in the mainstream media by celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie. And now a new group of college women - the ones in college now - are looking at Paltrow and Jolie as models for the appropriate way of dealing with sexual predators.

Let's reach the students who will abide by a "yes means yes" standard in sexual behavior and reeducate them to use it. And as more and more of them use it, others will adopt it too. We're on our way to a new social norm and that's a beautiful thing.

I think the better question is: How do we want sexual mores to shift, and what will that do for the American experience of both consensual and nonconsensual sex?

It's true that a dangerous combination of certainty and ignorance often shows up around sex and consent on campus. People on all sides of the issue have such strong feelings about it that they're blinded to the facts.

Once Donald Trump announced that Betsy DeVos was going to be his Education Secretary - a few months before I finished the manuscript - I had a pretty good idea of what was going to happen. He was going to overturn as much of what Barack Obama did, and the attendant social progress, as he could.