Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein's latest weekly column is about how the federal government is using its grants to higher education to apply "unconstitutional conditions" that attempt to force universities like Yale to handle sexual harassment complaints in certain ways.
Professor Epstein is always interesting to read, but on this one I think he leaves a couple of points underexplored. First, one wonders if Yale, left to its own devices and without federal government pressure, would do any better adjudicating these complaints, or if the professors and administrators, even on their own, would come at it from pretty much the same perspective as the federal bureaucrats. Second, if the whole situation is partly a consequence of the vastness of the federal funds flowing to the higher education sector, maybe that money flow is worth taking a closer look at, too, in terms of the history of it and the advantages and disadvantages of it. One place to begin would be here.