According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, between 1995 and 2011 only 0.6 percent of college women had experienced an attempted or actual sexual assault, which is less than the 0.8 percent of non-college women aged 18 to 24 who had the same experience over the same time. So American colleges are not hotbeds of assault and rape, and are actually safer for women than most other zones of life.

Even the treatment of the Rolling Stone drama as just a failure of journalism—Columbia offered an “anatomy of a journalistic failure”—feels insufficient. Yes, its writers and editors messed up royally (and still are, by refusing to make any significant changes to their staff or editorial processes.) But that terrible article arose out of a moral swamp that still festers even following the article’s retraction. It spoke to and reflected and sought to capture one of the most hysterical panics of our time: the idea that largely middle-class women at some of the best universities in the United States are stalked by danger, hunted by rapists, threatened by a foul, free-floating culture of violation.

It’s this madness that we must now challenge. And it will require more than a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism dean to do that. It will require all of us picking apart victim feminism, advocacy research, the demonization of men (especially of the frat variety), the culture of misanthropy, and the modern urge to trash both due process and civil rights in the name of hunting down a new breed of Emmanuel Goldsteins: jocks, lads, college guys. All of these are the ingredients, not only of Erdely’s sorry excuse for reporting, but also of the still extant, still profoundly damaging moral panic about rape.