KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author, along with Stuart Taylor, of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America's Universities.
I previously wrote about the new AP U.S. History guidelines (APUSH). The guidelines generated considerable criticism—in so small part because they seemed intent on evading state guidelines regarding the instruction of U.S. history. Basically: the earlier guidelines heavily emphasized themes of race, class, and gender, at the expense of more “traditional” types of U.S. history […]
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Amherst is being sued –and rightly so–in one of the most egregious of the many campus sex cases. In brief, this is what happened. After heavy drinking, two Amherst students had sex. The male involved was the boyfriend of the female’s roommate. Her friends made nasty comments about her or abandoned her for cheating on […]
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After several troubling court decisions on the handling of college sex cases, a state judge in California has issued a ringing defense of due process. The ruling by Judge Joel Pressman, first reported by Ashe Schow, held that the University of California-San Diego (UCSD), had provided a fundamentally unfair procedure to a student accused of […]
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Since March of 2014, federal and state courts have produced a run of decisions favorable to due process in campus sex cases. But in recent months, this welcome development has been reversed—most spectacularly in the deeply troubling decision in the Vassar case, but also in two recent decisions involving cases at Columbia and Miami (Ohio). […]
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Here are two troubling developments regarding campus due process from the Upper Midwest: Inside Higher Ed featured remarks from Susan Riseling, chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, regarding the intersection between campus police and Title IX responsibilities. Riseling told attendees at the International Association of College Law Enforcement Administrators conference that police chiefs […]
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Earlier this spring, a student filed a due process lawsuit against Brandeis, charging that he was disciplined under a procedure different from the one that existed when he arrived on campus. In one respect, the facts of this case are atypical. After a nearly two-year relationship (between two male students) ended, the accuser appears to […]
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Stuart Taylor and I have a jointly authored piece debunking the Washington Post series on campus sexual assault. The collection of articles, accompanied by a misleading poll, has also received searing, effective criticism from Ashe Schow in the Washington Examiner, Robby Soave in Reason, and David French in NRO. I recommend each piece. The series […]
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Lynne Cheney had a high-profile piece in the April 1 Wall Street Journal critiquing the draft exam associated with the new Advanced Placement U.S. history standards (APUSH). (I’ve written on these standards previously.) The standards have aroused considerable controversy in the scholarly community—the National Association of Scholars deserves the most credit for highlighting the issue. […]
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Kafka was born too early to write about Amherst College. At campus hearings on claims of sexual assault, procedures are relentlessly stacked again males and evidence of innocence doesn’t count. Amherst expelled a student for committing rape—despite text messages from the accuser, sent immediately after the alleged assault, (1) telling one student that she had […]
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In a polarized country, it probably should come as little surprise that campus due process also is becoming polarized over alleged sexual violations. While the Office for Civil Rights seeks to eviscerate the rights of accused students nationwide, accused students increasingly have more rights in red states than in blue states—largely because blue state governments […]
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The Crimson published a lengthy study last week analyzing the contribution patterns of Harvard professors in recent campaigns (2011-2014). The tally: 96 percent of the donations from the arts and sciences faculty went to Democrats. These results shouldn’t come as much surprise at this stage, but they’re a reminder of just how limited the ideological […]
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Male in ‘Mattress Case’ Sues Columbia KC Johnson Paul Nungesser—the Columbia student targeted by Emma Sulkowicz’s media campaign and described by Kristin Gillibrand as a “rapist” in a statement released by the New York senator’s office—has filed a Title IX lawsuit against Columbia University. The case was assigned to Judge Gregory Woods, an Obama appointee recommended […]
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Hans Bader has a perceptive post analyzing the University of Virginia’s new “affirmative consent” policy. Rather than learning from Rolling Stone and stressing due process, the site of the year’s biggest campus rape hoax has redefined sexual assault to include routine contact that no one off campus would deem criminal conduct. As Bader notes, UVA […]
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The long-awaited Columbia Journalism Review report of Rolling Stone’s UVA article, which ostensibly takes the magazine to task for falsely reporting a rape that never happened, sparked a new outcry from both the media and students on America’s college campuses. They’re horrified that the report could have a chilling effect on students reporting sexual assaults. No […]
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One of the most important elements of a senator’s power comes in the tradition of recommending district court judicial nominations in the senator’s home state. And so it perhaps should come as little surprise that the Senate’s most ardent opponent of campus due process, Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York), would have recommended the author of the […]
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Cornell is the latest university to face a due process lawsuit; last week, attorney Andrew Miltenberg filed a suit in New York’s Northern District. (You can read the complaint here.) The specifics are depressingly familiar—though with something of a twist, since Cornell featured one of the earliest post-“Dear Colleague” letter battles over due process. In […]
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The politics of campus due process are most unusual. Since the emergence of crime as a major (federal) political issue in the 1960s, Republicans have tended to be the tough-on-crime party, Democrats more concerned with the rights of the accused, especially when the accused are poor or racial minorities. (Obviously there have been exceptions in […]
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The Chronicle quotes New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand celebrating the revised version of the Campus Safety and Accountability Act (CASA), introduced last week, on a an expanded bi-partisan basis (up from eight co-sponsors to twelve), to the Senate. Rejoiced Gillibrand, “”The bill actually has clarified rights for the accused,” since the current system “doesn’t serve […]
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My experience at Ohio University offered me a first-hand glimpse into the mindset of anti-due process activists, and the subsequent media coverage has indicated a troubling willingness for misdirection. Austin Linfante, a reporter for the OU campus news site New Political, noted that the protesters furiously tweeted how the talk doubted that “the justice system […]
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Thanks to an invitation from the George Washington Forum, I had the opportunity last week to speak at Ohio University on due process and campus sexual assault. I made two primary arguments: first (citing how Duke responded to the lacrosse case), I challenged the idea that universities are somehow biased against sexual assault accusers, much […]
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Yale runs one of the strangest systems of handling sexual assault (“economic abuse” has been counted as a sexual attack, and proceedings can start without the alleged victim’s consent) so its semiannual reports on the subject are well worth studying. I’ve analyzed each of the previous six, all done as part of a settlement with […]
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Cathy Young’s must-read piece on the Columbia case made famous by accuser Emma Sulkowicz triggered a furious backlash, including a twitter hashtag campaign and a Mic article that cast aspersions without challenging a single fact that Young presented. Three elements of the reaction to the article deserve further comment. First, victims’ rights advocates have dismissed […]
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As expected, anti-Israel activist and purported American Indian Studies expert Steven Salaita has filed a lawsuit against the University of Illinois. My take on the merits of Salaita’s case remains essentially the same: (1) FIRE is absolutely correct in the chilling effects of Illinois’ “civility” standard; and (2) the Salaita case is most comparable to […]
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Last year, when the White House campus sexual assault task force issued its due process-unfriendly recommendations, the document excluded one critical item: how colleges and universities should coordinate with local law enforcement agencies. That item was promised at a later date; it now has appeared. As expected, the document gave little reason to believe that […]
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In the latest college to settle a due process lawsuit instead of defending its policies in court, MassLive reports that Amherst College reached a settlement with an anonymous male student who sued the school after Amherst withheld his degree. The case was unusual in a couple of respects: first, the allegation involved a same-sex rather […]
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Apart from Claire McCaskill, no senator has more aggressively advocated weakening due process protections for students accused of sexual assault than New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand. She continued her anti-due process crusade in two high-profile moves this week. First, Gillibrand invited Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz as her special guest for the State of the Union […]
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In an intriguing, and encouraging, recent pattern, publications beyond those associated with higher education or civil liberties have started paying attention to the dangerous diminution of due process on campus. Two pieces particularly stand out. First, writing in American Prospect, Harvard law professor and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner vehemently denounced both the new Harvard […]
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Perpetuating the journalistic debacle of its hit job on CUNY, The Atlantic has made major corrections to its “article”—yet it refuses to formally withdraw the piece. I had previously critiqued the article, which argued that CUNY’s (allegedly) excessively high admissions standards threatened the university’s central mission and harmed students of color. The thesis was fatally […]
Read MoreAround a decade ago, the leaders of CUNY’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, denounced plans to eliminate remediation at CUNY senior colleges. (This move was part of a pattern in which the PSC opposed virtually every reform proposed by former chancellor Matthew Goldstein.) The move was elitist and harmful to students of color, the […]
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At its early January annual session, the American Historical Association, in a procedural vote, decided not to debate two anti-Israel resolutions proposed by a group called “Historians Against the War.” (Given Hamas’ tendency to wage war against Israel, an outsider might have speculated that the group would be pro-Israel.) For the best analysis of the […]
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