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.
Among the many institutions facing due process lawsuits none, perhaps, is more deserving than Duke, a university that all but defined hostility to due process in the lacrosse case. The school lost in court last year, in a case filed by Lewis McLeod, whom Duke had branded a rapist after a highly dubious procedure. McLeod […]
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In 2014, twenty-eight Harvard Law professors published the strongest coordinated response to the post-2011 campus war on due process. The professors lamented that they found “the new sexual harassment policy inconsistent with many of the most basic principles we teach.” They alleged that Harvard’s new policies “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due […]
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The University of Virginia has distinguished itself in its ability to pretend that the collapse of Sabrina Erdely’s Rolling Stone article never occurred. President Teresa Sullivan—after rashly suspending not merely the fraternity at which “Jackie” was supposedly assaulted, but all fraternities—refused to lift the ban, or even to acknowledge that the factual basis for her […]
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FOIA requests from several reporters prompted the release of numerous e-mails between various UVA officials and Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Erdely and fact-checker Elizabeth Garber-Paul. A few items that we learned: Erdely and UVA Employees The e-mails show that UVA wanted to control its message by not allowing Erdely to interview lower-level administrators. As a result, […]
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James Ceaser recently became the first UVA professor to publicly speak out regarding the deeply unhealthy climate on his campus, exposed by the publication of the now-discredited Rolling Stone article alleging multiple gang rapes at the school. (The sole source for each of these allegations appears to have been “Jackie.”) Ceaser lamented how few people […]
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The collapse of the Rolling Stone rape story had an important byproduct—it showed the stunning unfairness of UVA’s proposed new sexual assault policies. UVA’s proposed guidelines, like those of many colleges, are heavily pitched toward accusers, minimize due process and all but ensure that key evidence will not come before the university, especially if that […]
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Southern Methodist University has become the latest target of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), signing an agreement admitting to violations of Title IX and adopting new policies. As with all such agreements, due process for accused students is the loser. But this agreement has a few unusual clauses. While the SMU OCR complaint dealt […]
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In the last couple of days, two items have appeared at the New York Times in which the paper—whose coverage of campus sexual assault issues has learned no lessons from its propagandistic performance in the Duke lacrosse case—purports to lecture other journalists on how they should cover the issue. The first came from a blog […]
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The collapse of Sabrina Rudin Erdley’s “don’t-tell-all” UVA gang rape story was quick. The Washington Post did what Erdely and Rolling Stone had refused to do—some actual reporting—and exposed massive holes in the accuser’s story. (Some examples: though the Rolling Stone article portrayed the alleged assault as some kind of fraternity initiation, no member of […]
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Yesterday’s Chronicle of Higher Education summarizes perhaps the main critique of Sarah Erdely’s “don’t-tell-all” article alleging a grotesque gang rape at UVA: the reporter’s decision not to seek contact from any of the people her article had described as gang rapists. That point, too, has now received a vigorous response from Erdely’s defenders. A faux-balanced […]
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Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s Rolling Stone article detailing an alleged brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia has triggered widespread outrage. But it also has prompted varying degrees of skeptical commentary from (most importantly) Richard Bradley, and also Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, Reason’s Robby Soave, and Judith Shulevitz in the New Republic. […]
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The Rolling Stone exposé of an alleged gang rape at the University of Virginia (and the university’s indifferent response) has received enormous attention. Three pieces analyzing events in Charlottesville and recommending solutions are particularly worthy of note. First, writing in Slate, Dahlia Lithwick (one of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s favorite legal commentators) noted that the case […]
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There are two certainties from the current crusade against due process for students accused of sexual assault. First, in coming years, there will be a higher percentage of convictions, since colleges must use the preponderance-of-evidence and are strongly discouraged from allowing accused students from cross-examining their accusers. Second, because so few due process protections exist […]
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Last Saturday, Yale Law professor Jeb Rubenfeld had an important op-ed in the Times discussing the issue of how colleges respond to campus sexual assault. His argument? “Forced by the federal government, colleges have now gotten into the business of conducting rape trials, but they are not competent to handle this job. They are simultaneously failing […]
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When Patrick Witt published his op-ed on what was done to him in a sexual assault hearing at Yale, he had to know that the critics would emerge from the woodwork. And so they have. The New York Times continues to stand behind its botched reporting on the case, which even the Times’ public editor […]
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Perhaps the highest-profile victim of the war on campus due process, former Yale quarterback Patrick Witt, has spoken out publicly for the first time. In an op-ed for the Boston Globe, Witt, now a student at Harvard Law School and prompted by the law school faculty’s speaking out against Harvard’s new policies, wrote that Yale’s […]
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The Daily Pennsylvanian reports that Penn is moving full speed ahead to weaken due process protections when campus tribunals handle sexual assault claims—and only when they handle sexual assault claims. The DP notes that students accused of sexual assault will no longer be judged by a jury of their peers, and instead will face a […]
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I’ve written frequently about the unfair, guilt-presuming processes that colleges and universities from Harvard to Occidental use when deciding sexual assault cases. But a second trend has occurred largely outside the public eye. As they have “reformed” their sexual assault procedures, colleges and universities also have increasingly instituted training programs for members of these disciplinary […]
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The latest due process lawsuit—albeit one with quite unsympathetic defendants—has been filed, this one against the University of Houston. You can read the complaint here, and the motion for a preliminary injunction here. The specifics of this case are tawdry. A male Houston student named Ryan McConnell, after a night of drinking heavily, hooked up […]
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Last year, when the American Studies Association announced its boycott of Israeli institutions of higher learning, the development was seen as a great step forward for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Now: not so much. As often occurs when extremist academics encounter the real world, the ASA has been forced to effectively neuter […]
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In an attempt to defend the indefensible, Ezra Klein penned a meandering column responding to the many critics of his “yes-means-yes” defense. Or, I should say, responding to some critics: he ignored perhaps the most troubling response to his piece, Cathy Young’s observation that he had blatantly misrepresented a column by her—which suggested that false […]
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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, […]
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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, […]
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“We are never sending our boys to college.” That line came not from some far-right crank, but instead from Robin Steinberg, a public defender. For an article in the New Republic, author Judith Shulevitz had asked Steinberg to review Columbia’s new sexual assault policy. (I had profiled the policy previously for Minding the Campus.) Shulevitz […]
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In a consistent pattern in the recent debate over due process on campus, federal actions have triggered more aggressive reactions, both on campus and by self-styled activists and their media and political allies. The most obvious example of this has been California’s “affirmative consent” law (which, for reasons its sponsors have never explained, applies only […]
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The Times and the Nation have both published articles on California’s “affirmative consent” bill, the litigator’s dream signed into law Sunday by Governor Jerry Brown. One piece was responsible journalism; the other was agitprop. Given that Richard Pérez-Peña co-authored the Times article, it’s not hard to guess which was agitprop. The new California law requires […]
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A few weeks ago, I commented on a recent report shepherded through by Benno Schmidt, chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees, on the need for a heftier trustee role in university governance. (I co-signed the report and strongly endorse its conclusions.) The report covered considerable ground, but some of its most thought-provoking recommendations involved […]
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In the fifth consecutive decision on behalf of due process rights for an accused student (joining Xavier, St. Joe’s, Duke, and Marlboro College), Judge William Lawrence, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a preliminary injunction preventing DePauw University from proceeding with a two-semester suspension for sexual assault meted out to a student named Ben King. Judge […]
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In response to pressure from the federal government and campus “activists,” two more high-profile universities are weakening due process protections afforded to students accused of sexual assault (and, regarding campus offenses, only to those students). The Daily Princetonian reports that a Princeton faculty committee has recommended lowering the school’s burden of proof for sexual assault […]
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I’ve often noted the poor, one-sided reporting on campus sexual assault—highlighted by a trio of publications (the Times, BuzzFeed, and Huffington Post) that seem to see their coverage more as advocacy than neutral reporting. In such an environment good journalistic work particularly stands out, as in Robin Wilson’s recent items in the Chronicle. Wilson had […]
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