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.
The Steven Salaita case at the University of Illinois continues to engender controversy. The three most perceptive commentaries came from FIRE and Steven Lubet. In comments with which I entirely agree, FIRE condemned the public statement of Illinois chancellor Phyllis Wise, who justified the revocation of Salaita’s offer on the grounds “we cannot and will […]
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A while back, I wrote a series here at Minding the Campus on the transformation of U.S. history in higher education. In a virtually unprecedented development, the last 10-20 years have featured a conscious decision to restrict, rather than expand, the range of knowledge about U.S. history that college students would receive. Elite departments (and, […]
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In response to questions from the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow, a spokesperson for Iowa senator Charles Grassley made a telling admission that has received insufficient attention. “The university,” the spokesperson noted, “will be responsible for any new requirements in the bill and be responsible to find the funds within its budget, whether that be from […]
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A group chaired by CUNY Board of Trustees chairman Benno Schmidt recently published a report entitled, “Governance for a New Era.” (I was part of the group, which included a variety of trustees, presidents, administrators, and faculty members.) The report, which has received considerable attention, urges trustees (and, working under the direction of trustees, senior […]
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Apart from the Steven Salaita affair (best analyzed by Northwestern law professor Steven Lubet) and the occasional, if typical, borderline anti-Semitic comment from a member of Columbia’s Middle Eastern studies department, the summer has been surprisingly quiet, given events in the region, in academic denunciations of Israel. Until now. A group of 45 historians prepared […]
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In the fourth consecutive court ruling of its type (following Xavier, St. Joe’s, and Duke), a federal judge in Vermont has sided with an accused student in a due process lawsuit. In a previously below-the-radar filing, a student named Luke Benning sued Marlboro College after the school suspended him for three semesters for sexual assault. […]
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To the surprise of many, three Republican U.S. senators have joined the Democrats in supporting the weakening of due process rights of students accused of rape and sexual assault in campus hearings. Along with earlier answers from Marco Rubio, the offices of two additional Republican senators, Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Chuck Grassley of […]
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The “Room for Debate” section at the New York Times recentlyexamined the issue of campus claims of sexual assault. But the “debate” more accurately an imbalanced exchange—perhaps unsurprising given the Times’ almost wholly one-sided coverage of this issue in its news pages. FIRE’s Samantha Harris made a typically compelling case for the importance of due […]
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The OCR’s “Dear Colleague” letter (2011) from the Obama Department of Education can be seen as a convenient starting point for the current war on campus due process for accused students—but a handful of elite schools actually made moves earlier.
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This article is second in a series on “the year that was” in higher education. The 2013-4 academic year featured a steady assault on campus due process, resulting from a loose alliance between the Obama administration (especially its Office for Civil Rights) and self-appointed “activists,” their faculty supporters, and a handful of higher-ed journalists. The year concluded […]
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Two updates on the congressional efforts to mandate weakened due process protections on campus. First, the Washington Examiner’s Ashe Schow sent a list of questions to the eight co-sponsors of the Senate “Campus Accountability and Safety Act.” Only one office—that of Marco Rubio (R-Florida)—appears to have responded. The spokesperson’s comments would do little to reassure […]
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The long-awaited bill from Missouri senator Claire McCaskill (co-sponsored by seven other senators, two Democrats and three Republicans) has now been introduced in the Senate. Given that McCaskill’s springtime town halls featured no defense attorneys or civil libertarians, it’s unsurprising that the bill contained nothing about the rights of accused students. As FIRE has pointed […]
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Brett Sokolow has been a model of inconsistency in the campus “rape wars.” As president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management (NCHERM), he has carved out a reputation as a foe of due process, but he surprised almost everyone this past spring by suggesting that he had knowledge of between eight and […]
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The issuance of the “Dear Colleague” letter in 2011 triggered a race to the bottom for due process in the Ivy League. The contest began with Yale, which adopted a new sexual assault policy that prevented accused students from presenting evidence of innocence in “informal” complaints and redefined the concept beyond recognition in formal complaints. […]
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Earlier this week, Huffington Post’s Tyler Kingkade published an article strongly critical of FIRE’s efforts to shine light on Occidental College’s troubling approach to due process. The article implied—without saying so directly—that FIRE was responsible for alleged harassment towards anti-due process activists on the campus. The underlying skepticism about the free exchange of information might […]
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Parents considering sending the child to Swarthmore College no longer can claim they weren’t warned. The Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer had a lengthy and quite well-done article examining the increasing lawsuits filed by students accused of sexual assault who were victimized by a lack of due process in campus disciplinary proceedings. Most of the cases the article […]
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The crusade to weaken due process rights of students accused of sexual assault traveled this week to Dartmouth, which is hosting a one-week conference entitled, “Summit on Sexual Assault.” As FIRE’s Peter Bonilla pointed out, the “matter of due process for accused didn’t make the agenda”; the presenters don’t include any civil libertarians or defense […]
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Sunday’s New York Times ran a lengthy story on what appears to be a mishandled allegation of sexual assault at Hobart and William Smith. (This was one of at least a dozen articles the Times has run on the topic, even as the “paper of record” has yet to run even one article on any […]
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Over the past several months, Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri) has emerged as the Senate’s most ferocious opponent of campus due process. One of the upper chamber’s unequivocal defenders of the Office for Civil Rights, McCaskill also attempted to browbeat the American Council of Education for representing its members, and convened several town hall sessions on campus […]
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The Washington Post has helpfully compiled a table, using Clery Act statistics, of allegations of campus sexual assaults in 2012 (the last year for which figures are available, including all schools with 1000 or more students). To put it mildly, the data do not substantiate White House claims of a virtually unprecedented violent crime wave […]
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The Chronicle has a revealing piece on a group largely overlooked in the war on due process—college attorneys, who since 2011 have been aggressively pressured to establish systems to investigate one of the most serious offenses in the criminal justices system (sexual assault) with few, and in some cases none, of the tools available to […]
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I recently looked at the inconsistent and in some cases outright arbitrary ways the nation’s leading universities are defining one form of campus sexual assault—rape that occurs because the accuser cannot consent. The piece made three points: (1) a substantial minority of schools have a definition of sexual assault that technically applies to many instances […]
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The Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has been waging a war on campus due process, ordering colleges to change their disciplinary processes to make it more likely that students accused of sexual assault will be found culpable. Many schools, however, have gone beyond the OCR’s demands in various ways, both in terms of due […]
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One striking element of the debate over sexual assault on campus is the almost complete lack of credibility for those whose predictions or observations have failed to stand the test of time. Two examples: The first came in a piece from anthropologist Barbara King, a blogger for NPR. King delivered a pretty standard “rape culture” posting, […]
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Slate‘s Emily Bazelon recently took a look at the tensions in campus sexual assault matters by looking into a the case of Leah Francis, a Stanford student who said that she was brutally raped on campus. Though Bazelon conceded due process problems, her column suggested that issues regarding campus due process are likely to get worse before […]
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The latest due process lawsuit comes against a highly vulnerable target: Occidental. Occidental is the California college whose rules allow branding a male student a rapist even if his female partner says “yes” to sexual intercourse. Moreover, the school includes what seems to be a disproportionate number of anti-due process “activists,” professors inclined toward delusional claims against their […]
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A federal district court in Ohio made an interesting ruling Wednesday in a lawsuit filed against Case Western Medical School by a student who had not reported his DWI arrest to school administraators. The issue was somewhat afield from the current debates about due process in higher education, but the reasoning of Judge James Gwin, […]
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The Obama administration’s Task Force recently contained a jarring recommendation to minimize the minimal due process protections that accused students on campus possess. Some schools, the report noted, “are adopting different variations on the ‘single investigator’ model, where a trained investigator or investigators interview the complainant and alleged perpetrator, gather any physical evidence, interview available […]
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Few universities are less well-suited to adjudicate sexual assault cases than Duke. The university’s president and judicial affairs staff remains the same as 2006-2007, when their egregious mishandling of events in the lacrosse case resulted in an approximately $6.7 million legal settlement with each of the three falsely accused players. The hostility to due process […]
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The National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, whose stated purpose is advising colleges on how to avoid legal liability, has earned a reputation as a foe of campus due process, especially on matters related to sexual assault. (In 2011, after FIRE criticized the “Dear Colleague” letter, NCHERM president Brett Sokolow responded, “FIRE is sticking […]
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