This week has featured a potential tipping point in the debate about due process and campus sexual assault.
The first event came in publication of an extraordinary column by Ezra Klein, defending California’s “affirmative consent” law. In one respect, it wasn’t surprising to see Klein defend the proposal; too many liberal commentators (not to mention, of course, the entire Democratic contingent in the California legislature, plus Governor Jerry Brown) have backed the law. But Klein’s argument was astonishing—he conceded that the law was flawed, even badly flawed, but celebrated the flaws as a virtue. The law will mean that “too much counts as sexual assault” and that innocent students will be branded rapists (though such cases, Klein suggests in a fact-free claim, “very, very rarely” occur). But Klein considered it “necessary” to get more students deemed guilty of rape in “morally ambiguous” situations to convince men in college (but, it seems, not anywhere else) that “they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.”
Klein’s column has triggered a torrent of criticism. The highest-profile came from New York’s Jon Chait, who expressed amazement that Klein was “arguing for false convictions as a conscious strategy in order to strike fear into the innocent,” a “conception of justice totally removed from the liberal tradition.” Amidst an off-base and politically correct interpretation of the lacrosse case, Freddie Deboer challenged Klein from the left, contending that the poor and minorities would be the most victimized by California’s law. James Taranto eviscerated Klein’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. FIRE’s Will Creeley tweeted that he was “completely shocked” by Klein’s column, which borrowed from the “same morally bankrupt justification trotted out for inhuman abuses of power for decades, [the] worst impulses of humanity.”
By committing a Kinsley gaffe—admitting the politically indefensible rationale for a policy—Klein’s column unintentionally served the cause of due process.
But California’s law is only a small part of the war on campus due process. A much more important document, touching on the central issue, appeared Wednesday morning. A letter published in the Boston Globe and co-signed by 28 current and emeritus members of the Harvard Law School faculty asserted that Harvard’s new sexual assault policies “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation.” The list of signatories included such high-profile names as Alan Dershowitz, Charles Ogletree, and Nancy Gertner; and in general was hardly a group that leaned to the right.
The specifics of the law professors’ criticism? An absence of meaningful discovery; a structure that makes the Title IX office investigator, judge, jury, prosecutor, and appeals court; a failure to provide “adequate representation for the accused,” especially poorer students; an overly broad definition of sexual harassment; and vague and seemingly arbitrary rules regarding sex while intoxicated.
The most interesting aspect of the law professors’ letter came in its demand that the school stand up to the federal government. The professors lamented that, in violation of principles of academic freedom, “Harvard apparently decided simply to defer to the demands of certain federal administrative officials, rather than exercise independent judgment about the kind of sexual harassment policy that would be consistent with law and with the needs of our students and the larger university community.” Signatories urged the university to withdraw the policy and start anew, while beginning “the challenging project of carefully thinking through what substantive and procedural rules would best balance the complex issues involved in addressing sexual conduct and misconduct in our community.”
And if the OCR followed through on its (empty) threat to withhold federal funds? “Harvard University is positioned as well as any academic institution in the country to stand up for principle in the face of funding threats.”
A Harvard University spokesperson essentially dismissed the criticism in a statement given to the Crimson. (It’s unlikely this blasé response will suffice; even the anti-due process New York Times ran a story on the law professors’ letter, deigning to mention for the first time the due process lawsuits as well.) Will Harvard’s donors and prominent alumni be satisfied with a policy many of its law faculty have warned “departs dramatically” from basic legal principles, “jettisoning balance and fairness in the rush to appease certain federal administrative officials”? Or will one university finally stand up for due process?
Klein’s reasoning and justifications are a lot like those of many defenders of this law, such as Amanda Marcotte and Ann Friedman. They see it as a way to attack ‘heterosexist’ modes of sexual intimacy and to deprogram such behavior from students by compelling them to engage in a prescribed transactional sequence of sexual interactions.
The fact that the law imposes an impossible standard of conduct, establishes an assumption of guilt, and strips accused students of due process is necessary, they believe, to obtain their goal of reforming heterosexuality. As Klein candidly states, they want to instill fear in students to force them to conform to their new model of sexuality.
I don’t think that it will do this. What’s more likely is that a generation of students will come to understand sexual assault as a natural an inevitable result of passionate sex.
Yes, the “Liberal Tradition” which turns Marxist butchers of the proletariat into peace loving innocents.
It should be apparent by now that these social policies [of modern liberalism] and the passions that drive them contradict all that is rational in human relating, and they are therefore irrational in themselves. But the faulty conceptions that lie behind these passions cannot be viewed as mere cognitive slippage.
The degree of modern liberalism’s irrationality far exceeds any misunderstanding that can be attributed to faulty fact gathering or logical error.
Indeed, under careful scrutiny, liberalism’s distortions of the normal ability to reason can only be understood as the product of psychopathology.
So extravagant are the patterns of thinking, emoting, behaving and relating that characterize the liberal mind that its relentless protests and demands become understandable only as disorders of the psyche. The modern liberal mind, its distorted perceptions and its destructive agenda are the product of disturbed personalities. — Lyle H. Rossiter, Jr. MD, The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness.
The left wants to keep the gov’t out of your bedroom except when it comes to he said she said
Would it not seem appropriate to drive a test case into federal appelate court an oblierate the whole concept? What is developing here is a 2 tier legal system. If you are a student you are at a lower tier, if not a higher tier as far as being accused, prosecuted and ultimately destroyed for said crime.
The Left is furious that men and women are having sex with each other.
Now That American law enforcement are getting federal pork bloating dollars to manufacture faulty and inflammatory statistics that are Inflaming a prejudice against the innocent…. American society (especially women) are going to have to start bracing themselves for the cultural aftermath that these perversions are having on over-all hetero-relationships in the US.
Im alluding to the reality that America is becoming a nation where a guy may have to go MGTOW…just to not be harassed by a federally pork bloated / perverse law enforcement system that gets federal pork bloating dollars to persecute the innocent.
“Is the Left losing its mid over campus sex?”
Short answer – yes.
Less snarky answer – while it is important to try to prevent crime, educate young people as to what consequences can sometimes follow actions, and prosecute offenders of the law, one cannot put the cart before the horse and ignore basic Constitutional freedoms. If these offenders are indeed guilty, then one can prosecute them through the already-established channels for due process.
Universities can certainly play an important part here in both education and in cooperating with law enforcement, but Universities are not the enforcers themselves. They need not cower before the Feds, either, by imagining and reacting to harms that have not yet come to pass.