UNITED STATES
WBUR

Fri, Jul 18, 2014
by Rich Barlow

Anyone who paid any attention in the last decade to the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal knows that one of the bishops’ biggest bungles was secrecy in dealing with predator priests. As recently as May, the United Nations condemned surreptitious transfers of molesters to new parishes. The moral? Cover-ups harm the cover-uppers, too  .

One might think that universities, those repositories of PhDs, might grasp this lesson of recent history. Yet recent headlines about colleges grappling with sexual assaults on campus suggest that the culture of secrecy that permitted abuse in the rectory may have its counterpart in the Ivory Tower.

Circumstances differ, of course. Pedophile priests used positions of moral authority and their followers’ inherent trust in them to turn powerless children into prey, while the alleged perpetrators on college campuses have been fellow students of the…