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.
Here’s a probable growth area for litigation: suits against colleges for rigging sexual misconduct hearings against males, some of whom are being convicted of rape and other sexual offenses without any semblance of due process. The federal government is implicated here: the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has mandated a lower threshold of certainty in sexual […]
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The OCR is back in action, investigating new claims that college procedures dealing with sexual assault do not support accusers enough and so have violated Title IX. The Los Angeles Times reports that a complaint was filed against USC–by a student who had brought her allegations to police, only to have the DA’s office conclude […]
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The Duke lacrosse case represented an almost textbook example of how key elements of the media (notably the New York Times) should not cover sexual assault cases. Uncritical acceptance of Mike Nifong’s version of events, undisguised sympathy toward accuser Crystal Mangum, an utter lack of skepticism about key procedural issues presented by Mangum’s defenders. Yet […]
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A wide array of public interest groups (ranging from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy to the Student Press Law Center) and scholars (including me) have signed onto an open letter from FIRE urging the Education and Justice Departments to retract their Montana “blueprint,” which if applied would impose […]
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I previously wrote about the federal lawsuit filed against St. Joseph’s University (and accuser Lindsay Horst) by former St. Joe’s student Brian Harris. (You can read the complaint here.) Here are three reasons why the lawsuit could be significant. Burden of Proof. Critics of the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter have focused on the OCR’s mandate […]
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An interesting Title IX case was filed earlier this week in Pennsylvania. (You can read the complaint here.) Brian Harris, a former student at St. Joseph’s University, was expelled from the school after he was determined to have committed sexual misconduct. Harris has sued St. Joe’s, alleging gender discrimination on grounds that the judicial procedure […]
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In settling a dispute at the University of Montana, the federal government decided to impose a “blueprint” that envisioned speech codes at virtually all American universities. An outcry arose from all ideological quarters. George Will criticized the arrangement–but so too did the liberal editorial page of the Los Angeles Times and such usual defenders of […]
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Earlier this spring, CUNY scored a coup when it announced that David Petraeus, former Director of Central Intelligence and commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be joining the CUNY faculty as a visiting professor of public policy, in the Macaulay Honors College. (The Honors College, one of the most important legacies of […]
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Tablet has a typically superb exposé by Jamie Kirchick of the “pinkwashing” conference, held late in the spring semester at the CUNY Graduate Center. I had previously written about the concept; the “pinkwasher” theorists allege, without evidence, that Israel uses its generally positive record on gay rights to obscure its allegedly evil treatment of the […]
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Two recent academic-tinged scandals in college athletics seem saturated in political correctness. At the University of North Carolina, some student-athletes (as well as some non-athletes) benefited from taking no-show classes. The university brought in former governor Jim Martin to conduct a blue-ribbon review; Martin’s report indicated that the problem was solely on the academic side […]
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In the ideal world, academic unions stand as guardians of academic freedom. In the real world, too often they cling to the status quo, resisting needed reforms, opposing meritocracy, and working to stifle campus dissent. Then there’s the CUNY faculty union (the Professional Staff Congress), whose leading figures act as if their goal in life […]
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Inside Higher Ed reporter Allie Grasgreen has a piece today lionizing the students who’ve filed Title IX complaints to minimize the already weak due process protections for students accused of sexual assault on campus. (Richard Pérez–Peña covered this exact same topic and in some instances the exact same people, albeit in an even more fawning fashion, a […]
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In the academic world, the rules on “diversity” hires generally remain unspoken. Public colleges and universities–and private schools that care about their reputations–can’t well advertise new positions with the tagline, “No white males need apply.” Beyond the legal ramifications, such a move would abandon any pretense that colleges want the best possible faculty for all […]
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Eugene Volokh posts a counterintuitive argument (from a civil libertarian’s standpoint) defending the OCR-imposed preponderance-of-evidence standard for campus allegations of sexual assault. Since Volokh advances a much more compelling argument for the change than did the OCR’s “Dear Colleague” letter, the post is worth reading in full. His basic argument: campus allegations of sexual assault […]
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Columbia professor Joseph Massad has made the news yet again. Small wonder: his recent essay in al Jazeera, entitled “The Last of the Semites,” linked Zionism to Nazism and claimed that all of the good, anti-Zionist Jews perished in the Holocaust, Bloomberg columnist Jeffrey Goldberg congratulated al Jazeera for having “posted one of the most anti-Jewish screeds in recent […]
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Students at Stanford are the latest to fall victim to the assault on due process mandated by the “Dear Colleague” letter. Last week, the university’s faculty senate approved the “Alternative Review Process,” an across-the-board diminution of due process rights for Stanford students accused of sexual assault. The Office of Civil Rights’ “Dear Colleague” letter, to […]
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The End of Sex is a frustrating book. Author Donna Freitas, a self-described feminist, has written a thoughtful and richly-researched study of how the sexual culture on contemporary campuses shortchanges many college students. She draws from a rich data base, namely, a multi-year survey of students at different colleges supplemented by the author’s own experience […]
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At Occidental, a student can be found guilty of sexual assault even if his partner said “yes” to sexual intercourse. And yet the school has been targeted by opponents of due process on campus–ranging from celebrity attorney Gloria Allred to Occidental professor Danielle Dirks to Richard Pérez-Peña’s slanted coverage in the New York Times–for not […]
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At some point the demands for federal investigations into our colleges’ supposed indifference to accusers in sexual assault cases will reach the point of parody. In fact, that point might already have been reached with two recent developments. First, celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, an attorney who never met a TV camera she didn’t like, has […]
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Those eager to see a shredding of political correctness on campus should sample this interview between HBO’s Bill Maher and Brian Levin, a professor at California State-San Bernardino who directs the school’s Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism. Levin’s apparent goal in the interview was to suggest that all major religions are equally inclined toward politically-oriented […]
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This past February, in the final act of Brooklyn College’s BDS fiasco, four Jewish students were kicked out of the talk. (Brooklyn’s Political Science Department had formally voted to affiliate itself with the talk, which featured two speakers who advocated a nationality-based boycott against Israelis, divestment from Israel, and international sanctions against the Jewish state.) […]
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Wayward reporter Richard Perez–Pena, who covers campus sex codes and hearings for the New York Times, recently examined events at four campuses: Amherst, Yale, the University of North Carolina, and Occidental, offering readers positive portraits of “activists” who seek to decimate due process protections for students accused of sexual assault. A hallmark of the Times‘ coverage of college sexual assault questions has […]
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The year of the extremist continues at CUNY’s Brooklyn College. Fresh off the anti-Israel BDS fiasco, the college has announced that the prestigious Charles Lawrence Memorial Lecture will be delivered by the chairman of Duke’s sociology department, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Such high-profile figures as John Hope Franklin, Eugene Genovese, William Julius Wilson, and Herbert Gans have […]
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Richard Pérez-Peña, an unusually shaky New York Times reporter who covers campus sexual misconduct cases and gets many of them wrong, has been corrected by his bosses, though the Times didn’t announce it as a correction and managed to introduce a new error while altering the inaccurate wording of the March 19 story. At issue is […]
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New York Times reporter Richard Pérez-Peña has had a disturbing record of slanted coverage of campus sexual assault issues, but he brought his performance to new lows in an article posted to the Times website Tuesday afternoon. MTC readers will doubtless remember Pérez-Peña’s name; he authored the wildly slanted Times exposé on former Yale quarterback […]
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Nearly two years after the Office of Civil Rights ordered all universities to lower the procedural threshold through which accused students can be found guilty of sexual assault, the New York Times turned its attention to the issue–via a five-person “Room for Debate” item. Superficially, the segment seemed balanced: two essays in favor the policy, […]
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As some readers of Minding the Campus know, since last summer I’ve been embroiled in a legal controversy with Duke. The battle ended last week, when, facing a potential defeat before the US. District Court in Maine, Duke withdrew its subpoenas. The affair spoke volumes about the indifference to First Amendment values at one of […]
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Inside Higher Ed features a somewhat odd analysis about a study by the AHA comparing words in the titles of dissertations that appeared between 1920 and 1960 with those that appeared in the last 20 years. According to IHE‘s Scott Jaschik, “For the recent titles, some of the analysis may challenge conventional wisdom about the […]
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You’d think that after the recent debacle at Brooklyn College, anti-Israel fanatics would give CUNY a break. Guess again. The CUNY Graduate Center has scheduled for this spring a conference on “pinkwashing.” For the uninitiated, “pinkwashing” is the almost comical claim that that the Israeli government highlights its record on gay rights to detract attention […]
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In November, I reviewed the new, supposedly “untold” story of 20th century U.S. history penned by Oliver Stone and American University professor Peter Kuznick. (Parents of American University students can spend their tuition dollars having their children enroll in Kuznick’s course, “Oliver Stone’s America.”) In the review, I mentioned that Princeton professor Sean Wilentz had […]
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