The case spanned two presidential administrations and now may have implications for a third. It paints a picture of a campus culture in which students have become hyper-aware of the rules of academic sexual misconduct and worry about how every intimate encounter is going to look down the road. The complaint against Mr. Feibleman was filed in the fall of 2016 during the Obama administration, whose campus sexual assault policies broadly favored believing the accusers, who are usually women. Those policies were in effect through the adjudication of the case by Columbia. In the background was the presidential campaign, during which a tape surfaced of Donald J. Trump, the Republican candidate for president, boasting about forcing himself on women. Columbia had also in the recent past received widespread media attention from the case of Emma Sulkowicz, who carried a mattress around the campus as a piece of performance art to protest what she said had been her raped by a fellow student, whom Columbia cleared. Columbia issued its verdict against Mr. Feibleman in June 2017, declining to give him his diploma. He filed a federal suit against the university in May 2019. That suit was settled after the Trump administration had adopted a regulation to give more due process protections to the accused, generally men, effective in August.