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.
From Newsweek (via Inside Higher Ed) comes news of an unusual, but excessively limited, proposal from California Assemblyman Mike Gatto. In response to events at Occidental, Gatto says he’ll introduce a bill requiring colleges in California to report some claims of sexual assault to police. This is an excellent idea–trained law enforcement officers, not campus […]
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Defenders of the academic status quo obviously don’t care much about promoting intellectual or pedagogical diversity on campus. But they should, if only for pragmatic reasons. In an ideal world, a robust marketplace of ideas on campus could serve as a testing grounds, forcing advocates of dubious concepts to defend themselves or rethink their assumptions. […]
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In analyzing the backlash against the American Studies Association’s demand for a boycott against all Israeli colleges and universities, two numbers are important: 81 and 4. No fewer than eighty-one college or university presidents have personally denounced the boycott (as helpfully compiled by Avi Mayer); the number is likely higher. But only four colleges or […]
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While Richard Pérez-Peña and the New York Times continue to ignore the issue, Bloomberg‘s John Lauerman penned a lengthy article on the wave of Title IX lawsuits filed by male students victimized by biased college sexual assault procedures. Unlike the Times‘ coverage of the Title IX/sexual assault procedures, Lauerman offered a balanced perspective, combining several […]
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Now that college hearings on rape and sexual assault are much in the news, particularly for their arbitrary procedures and unjust results, there’s a basic question to answer: why are colleges doing this at all? Why do they need to develop their own investigative and punishment procedures to duplicate a process that already exists in […]
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Last week, James Taranto penned an extraordinary exposé of the continuing war on due process in college sexual assault tribunals. (“This is the kind of story I became a journalist to write,” he tweeted.) Taranto told the story of Joshua Strange, an Auburn student expelled for sexual assault, based on thin, arguably non-existent, evidence, and […]
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Most parents, college graduates, or even legislators could be excused for lacking a detailed sense of the state of affairs on college campuses today, since higher education policy issues rarely emerge in the mainstream media. This pattern makes the one-sided coverage in the one newspaper–the New York Times–that regularly covers higher-ed issues especially objectionable. A […]
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On two issues a chasm exists between the academic mainstream and views outside the campus walls. The first, of course, is using racial and ethnic preferences in faculty hiring procedures and (except for Asians and Asian-Americans) in elite university student admissions. A virtual article of faith in the academy, the use of racial preferences attracted […]
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An important victory for FIRE in the organization’s efforts to encourage the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to return to a position of respecting the due process rights of the nation’s college students. Last week, the OCR (which under 1st-term Obama appointee Russlynn Ali consistently ignored FIRE) sent a rather churlish letter to FIRE president […]
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The Yale Daily News has an interesting scoop today–it turns out that the university has the authority to access a student’s e-mail account, without informing the student. The paper interviewed 73 students on campus; only three, according to the Daily News, “were aware of the specifics of Yale’s policy.” The paper’s report further indicates that […]
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In Cathy Young’s excellent article on the “campus rape that wasn’t” at Ohio University, she referenced an open letter, penned by 34 Ohio University professors, expressing “deep concern” about the purported assault. You’d think, in light of the experience of Duke’s Group of 88, college faculty would be reluctant to pen open letters about sexual […]
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Perhaps because of my experience with the Group of 88 in the Duke lacrosse case, I’m always a little suspicious when I see an open letter signed by dozens of professors at an elite school attacking their institution’s student-athletes. Recently, 63 professors at Colgate signed an open letter insinuating–though never quite coming out and making […]
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“We should be seeing 12,500 cases a year.” So spoke Jennifer Hammat, Title IX coordinator for the University of Texas. As FIRE’s Peter Bonilla tweeted, “That quote put differently: ‘we should be seeing 250-300 rapes/sexual assaults per week.’” Does anyone (apart, it seems, from Hammat) believe that there are 300 rapes each week at UT? […]
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A few months ago, a lawyer for the State University of New York (SUNY) penned a startling column about the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) “blueprint,” introduced for the University of Montana as a national model for dealing with sexual assault and sexual harassment on campus. In the “blueprint,” the OCR […]
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NSA-like surveillance on American campuses? Oh, yes. In a fascinating column for the Guardian, FIRE’s Nico Perrino cites examples ranging from Montana to Occidental to Kentucky to Valdosta State to St. Augustine’s College to Johns Hopkins, noting the prevalence of the anti-privacy pattern. Perrino leads by recalling events from earlier this year at Harvard, when […]
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Despite a delay caused by settlement talks, Vassar has now filed its response to Peter Yu’s Title IX lawsuit. Unlike St. Joe’s, which at least attempted to defend its actions in a similar Title IX suit, Vassar’s response is blunter: the courts should simply trust that the college correctly handles disciplinary matters, even though the […]
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The government shutdown has brought scant good news, but there’s at least one positive development: the investigators at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have been deemed non-essential. As a result, OCR has been forced to postpone scheduled inspection visits, including one to Yale. That said, the shutdown at some point will end, and upon […]
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Swarthmore received considerable media attention this past spring, after several students filed a complaint against the school, alleging that Swarthmore’s sexual assault policy was so faulty that it discriminated against women in violation of Title IX. Neither the complaint nor most media coverage mentioned the specifics of the policy, which in fact was extraordinarily one-sided […]
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The Huffington Post brings news of faculty complaints at Occidental College. The background: Several months ago, students filed an OCR complaint, alleging that the school’s process for investigating sexual assault complaints was so biased against accusers that it violated Title IX. That process (which nearly all news media ignored) denies the accused student a right […]
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Classes have started at CUNY, and at least one highly troubling event has occurred. Last week, NRO revealed that CUNY students and at least six members of the CUNY faculty union, the PSC, had descended upon the Macaulay Honors College campus to harass David Petraeus, a visiting professor at the Honors College this term. The […]
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What is “nonconsensual sex”? Rape, right? Not at Yale, where the term can be applied to a variety of acts generally accepted as minor offenses or non-offenses in the real world. Since 2010 Yale has become the national center of efforts to whittle away the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault in […]
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The anti-Republican classroom rant of Michigan State professor William Penn has attracted considerable attention in the last few days. (A student surreptitiously recorded Penn criticizing the Romneys, attendees to the 2012 Republican National Convention, and the election law recently passed on a party-line vote in North Carolina’s GOP-controlled legislature.) Three lessons come to mind about […]
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A strange story out of Swarthmore involving anti-due process activist Mia Ferguson, who was last in the news in April, when she joined several fellow students in filing a Title IX complaint against Swarthmore, on grounds that college procedures insufficiently protected the rights of sexual assault accusers. (Ferguson claimed that she was raped by another […]
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Reporting on a first-in-the-nation law passed in North Carolina, Inside Higher Ed’s Allie Grasgreen spoke to three administrators in the UNC system, plus a “Dear Colleague” letter defender. The law will require colleges to allow most students accused before public university disciplinary panels to be represented by an attorney. (Duke, naturally, will continue to deny […]
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For the third time in as many months, a student whose college deemed him a rapist has filed suit in federal court, this time against Xavier University. But the case filed by former Xavier student Dez Wells differs in two important respects. First, Wells’ accuser, Kristen Rogers, went to the authorities–who after thoroughly reviewing the […]
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There’s a new and troubling development in the Brian Harris case. Harris, as you’ll recall, was a St. Joseph’s student accused of sexual assault but denied basic due process rights throughout a judicial procedure that resulted in his expulsion. Harris is now suing St. Joe’s for violating his Title IX rights, alleging that St. Joe’s […]
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A horrifying story out of Vanderbilt, where four former football players–Cory Batey, JaBorian McKenzie, Brandon Vandenburg, and Brandon Banks–have been charged with sexually assaulting an unconscious Vanderbilt student. Authorities suggest that both video and photographic evidence exists to bolster the allegations. The alleged crime occurred in a Vanderbilt dorm. If true, the allegations will–and should–raise […]
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CUNY’S faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, provides something of a funhouse-mirror version of everything that’s wrong with the contemporary academy. Far-left ideologues who vehemently oppose meritocracy, the union leadership seems more concerned with Israeli national security policy or Stella D’Oro breadsticks than securing better pay, benefits, and workload terms for the full-time faculty they […]
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It’s rare indeed to get an inside look into how the “holistic” admissions process actually works at a major university. The “holistic” approach allegedly treats all applicants individually but, it’s widely assumed, actually serves as a cover to allow public universities to employ unconstitutional, quota-like racial preferences. A first-person recollection of Cal-Berkeley’s “holistic” process penned […]
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Yale’s latest report on its new sexual assault policy, written by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, is already drawing fire. The feminist blog Jezebel angrily asserts that at Yale, rape “is described as ‘nonconsensual sex,’ and it’s usually punishable by ‘written reprimand.’” Anti-due process activists on campus, according to Jezebel, are similarly infuriated. But at Yale, […]
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