Unfortunate that a bad investigator made a professor's life difficult. I liken it to a bad boss who can make one ultimately lose one's job for entirely unclear reasons.
Without any evidence that this is a systemic problem, I wonder why it would justify my attention.
I view this more as like a publication of a vulnerability: "Hey, one major university believes they have to thoroughly investigate even the most bad-faith accusations against academic rivals for the same job, which is ripe for abuse."
It doesn't matter that only one (publicly known) case has happened, if there's the potential of others latching on.
The author makes the point that the investigator was sympathetic, but had to follow policy. It's the policy that is defective:
>Melanie also hadn’t been able to locate a current student named Rebecca James in Marta’s department, but she said that the name could always be an alias, and she was still obligated to investigate Marta now that a “credible” accusation had been made.
>“Good question,” Melanie responded, her voice bright again. “Because of the funding that we receive through Title IX, we’re required to investigate everything. And with that we want to really run everything to the ground.”
Why didn't the investigator subpoena the details about the accounts sending the accusations? That would have shown right away that the accusations were not "credible" and the university could have just dropped the investigation right away.
By the second go round, when the "y'all" message arrived, the credibility problem was obvious but the investigation didn't address it.
This sounds to me like a very limp bureaucratic response by someone just going through the motions, with no real effort to resolve matters.
Without any evidence that this is a systemic problem, I wonder why it would justify my attention.