MEGAN MCARDLE: Rape on Campus Belongs in the Courts.

Of course, no one enjoys testifying about an assault — but you are rarely asked to prove that you didn’t consent to being pummeled. The shame and horror of it keep many victims from coming forward or pressing charges.

It’s understandable, then, that many people want to loosen the standards for prosecuting rapes. This can’t be done in a criminal trial, but it can in a college judiciary hearing — and that’s just what the government, and not a few people on campus, has been pressing colleges to do.

Yet as understandable this instinct is, it’s wrong. No one accused of a serious crime should have his fate in the hands of a single investigator with a mandate to err on the side of believing the people who are testifying against him. In fact, colleges shouldn’t be handling this sort of thing at all. If a college wouldn’t conduct a murder trial, it shouldn’t be conducting rape trials, either. We certainly shouldn’t press them to punish these crimes because we can’t get a conviction in a court of law, as it sometimes seems is happening.