If you are a dissenting professor or a male student in modern American higher education, there is a chance that you’ll be subjected to legal proceedings so bizarre, so opaque, and so unfair that you won’t believe they could happen in the United States of America. On the basis of the most flimsy of complaints, supported by minimal to nonexistent evidence, you can find yourself deprived of a lawyer and facing tribunals of hostile, barely trained ideologues applying only the flimsiest rules of evidence. As Northwestern professor Laura Kipnis discovered, it can even be an ordeal to discover the nature of the charges against you. And for every Kipnis case that gets heavily covered by the national media, there are dozens more that go wholly unreported, hidden behind university confidentiality requirements.

When students and professors question this travesty of justice, the response is uniform: The university’s hands are tied. These actions are required by federal law, by Title IX. But this is a monstrous, destructive lie. In reality, the modern campus Star Chamber is the product of collusion between a lawless Obama administration and ideologically complicit universities — with both institutions defying established legal norms to violate due process and chill constitutionally protected speech.

Title IX is, in fact, one of the shortest significant statutes in the United States Code. Its key operative provision is as follows: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” This is the statute passed according the constitutional process — through the House and Senate, signed by the president.

The statute has been dramatically amplified by voluminous regulations, passed through the typical notice-and-comment process, which is less democratic (obviously) than statutory enactment but still formally allows for public input. Multiple Title IX regulations have been challenged in court, with the cases often resulting in significant changes to the regulations as well as the statute itself.

Yet in April 2011, the Obama administration abandoned both the statutory and the regulatory rule-making processes to unilaterally issue a “Dear Colleague” letter from the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR). The letter relied on debunked statistics on the prevalence of sexual assault on campus and then not only mandated an extraordinarily low burden of proof in sexual-assault cases (“preponderance of the evidence” rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard applied in criminal cases) but failed to even acknowledge the tension between expansive sexual-harassment prohibitions and the broad constitutional protections afforded even “offensive” speech.

These procedural and substantive problems were immediately recognized by critics on the left and the right. For example, 16 University of Pennsylvania law professors criticized new university policies enacted in response to the OCR letter by reminding the university that the OCR had overstepped its bounds:

In addressing the issue of sexual assault, the federal government has sidestepped the usual procedures for making law. Congress has passed no statute requiring universities to reform their campus disciplinary procedures. OCR has not gone through the notice-and-comment rulemaking required to promulgate a new regulation. Instead, OCR has issued several guidance letters whose legal status is questionable.

Yet despite the lawless federal action, it’s gone largely unchallenged in the courts. Why? Why have billion-dollar educational institutions shied away from legal confrontation with the Department of Education, even when the department clearly violated mandatory rule-making requirements? One reason, of course, is fear. The DOE can threaten federal funding, and universities are dependent on the flow of federal dollars. The primary reason, however, is ideology. Universities are in the grip of a feminist-driven hysteria, with university campuses inaccurately portrayed as among America’s most dangerous places for young women. The price of defying the OCR — which enabled the campus crackdown — was the ire of the radical campus Left.

So universities meekly acquiesced, crafting new policies that have done nothing to calm the hysteria but have instead given ideologues powerful new tools to crush dissent and ruin innocent students’ lives. For example, at Northwestern alone, Professor Kipnis faced a Title IX complaint over her Chronicle of Higher Education essay, a faculty colleague faced a second complaint for objecting to Ms. Kipnis’s treatment at a faculty meeting, and the president of the university faced his own complaint for writing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal supporting academic freedom. How many professors or administrators are willing to speak freely with Title IX investigations the price of offending the wrong students?

In other contexts, however, universities do know how to fight the federal government — when they care to. Let’s not forget that a coalition of universities fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to bar military recruiters from campus — even with federal funding hanging in the balance. In addition, Title IX’s impact on college athletics led to years of contested cases, where colleges strove mightily to limit the act’s impact on their sports programs.

The conclusion is inescapable: All too many universities welcome the federal government’s lawlessness. It gives them exactly the cover they need to enact regulations they could never otherwise justify. Universities are addicted to censorship, and the Department of Education is their partner and enabler. Title IX has become a blank slate, a convenient place for the Obama administration and its campus partners to scrawl their speech codes, their corrupt legal processes, and their contempt for academic freedom.

President Barack Obama is less than stalwart in the fight against ISIS and doesn’t seem overly concerned about Vladimir Putin’s predation in Ukraine or China’s aggression in the South China Sea. It is the fight against climate change, an allegedly dire threat to the nation’s security, that brings out his inner Churchill.

In remarks at the Coast Guard Academy commencement, Obama pledged his undying hostility to climate change and his determination to fight it on the beaches and in the fields. He called it “one of the most severe threats” we face and “an immediate risk to our national security.” President Obama is to climate change what Cato the Elder was to Carthage.

He hailed the Coast Guard for building more fuel-efficient cutters, and the Marines for deploying with portable solar panels. It was one of the most insipid calls to arms ever made by an American commander-in-chief, and there is unlikely to be much competition until President Elizabeth Warren rallies the U.S. Navy against income inequality.

From the president’s urgency, you would think that climate change is beheading American hostages and taking over large swathes of Middle Eastern countries, toward the end of establishing a hostile climate-change empire. The reality is that, even accepting his premises about the state of the science, he can point only to laughably tenuous connections between climate change and national security.

The president cited drought as one of the causes of the Syrian civil war. Yet an article in the journal Middle Eastern Studies notes that Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon experienced drought in 2007–2008. None of them collapsed into a genocidal hellhole. Nor is drought unusual in Syria. According to the article, “Over the last 50 years, from 1961 to 2009, Syria experienced nearly 25 years of drought, which represents over 40 percent of the period.”

Quite reasonably, the article counsels focusing on the corrupt and dysfunctional Syrian government as the fundamental cause of the uprising. The drought “should be considered the backdrop of years of mismanagement, unsustainable policy making and rising rural poverty, which fueled pre-existing discontent and sparked the first protests.” Not to mention the fact that countries all over the Middle East and North Africa experienced revolts at the same time.

The president warned of how climate change could create “mass migrations,” the kind of disruption that a White House document says will disproportionately affect Africa and Asia. Even if this is true, how will it implicate our national security? The United States was content to stand by while 800,000 people died in the Rwandan genocide and more than 5 million in Congo’s civil war. If that mass slaughter didn’t move us, we aren’t going to mobilize the troops to manage climate-driven mass migrations.

Another climate-change hot spot is the Arctic, with President Obama predicting that summers could be ice-free there by around 2050. Man the battle stations? Well, no. A Brookings Institution article notes that “what we’re seeing in the Arctic is that receding ice is triggering commercial competition and governance cooperation; not conflict.”

Typically, the president implied clear and present dangers from climate change, although the “consensus” science he purports to champion projects effects on extreme weather roughly 80 years from now. By then today’s cadets will have long ago passed the baton of the fearsome battle against climate change to subsequent generations.

Of course, if climate change were a true enemy of the United States, President Obama would extend a hand of peace, or declare victory and go home.

Defining climate change as a national-security threat is simply a rhetorical ploy to stoke alarmism, in hopes of creating support for self-sacrificial anti-carbon policies that can’t survive any reasonable cost-benefit analysis. War is the health of the state, the writer Randolph Bourne once said. In this case, it is specifically the health of Environmental Protection Agency rules and global regulations.

A simple request for an unopened can of Diet Coke on a United Airlines flight left Tahera Ahmad in tears. A Muslim chaplain and director of interfaith engagement at Northwestern University, Ahmad, 31, was traveling Friday from Chicago to Washington for a conference promoting dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian youth. She was wearing a headscarf, or hijab. For hygienic reasons, she asked for an unopened can of soda, she said. The flight attendant told her that she could not give her one but then handed an unopened can of beer to a man seated nearby. Ahmad questioned the flight attendant. “We are unauthorized to give unopened cans to people because they may use it as a weapon on the plane,” she recalled the flight attendant telling her.