For years, under Title IX, a student charged with sexual assault was not permitted to face their accusers and cross-examine them. The rationale by feminists was that confronting the accuser was equivalent to another sexual assault. This policy violated due process, even though some innocent students’ reputations and careers have been ruined. The Chronicle of […]
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Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently indicated that the process for creating fairer Title IX regulations has reached its final stages. As the new rules loom, the higher-ed establishment has demonstrated an almost uniform opposition to creating fairer Title IX procedures. The most recent example came from NASPA, the organization of student affairs officials. Few organizations […]
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In an environment where accused students too often need to go to court to undo unfair Title IX adjudications, lawsuits against universities continued apace in 2019. A critical ruling in the Seventh Circuit highlighted the year, but some troubling rulings elsewhere provided a reminder that in this area of the law, an unsympathetic judge can […]
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Few universities have a more troubling record on Title IX matters than Yale. A few months after settling a lawsuit brought by former basketball captain Jack Montague—thereby avoiding trial on a variety of claims, including that the university manipulated its procedures to bring charges against Montague and then found him guilty despite a preponderance of […]
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The Ninth Commandment urges us as follows: “Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” The principle of false witness as an offense has been incorporated in British Common Law and American law as “perjury … defined as swearing falsely, under oath, in a judicial proceeding, about a material issue.” Perjury is a felony, a serious criminal offense. […]
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The big news in campus sexual misconduct hearings is that believers in trauma-informed adjudications are on the defensive. What that verbal mouthful means is that apparent weaknesses in a complainant’s case—inarticulateness, contradictions, lying, or being too “frozen’’ or fearful of testifying—must not be automatically taken as evidence that sexual trauma has occurred. In recent years, […]
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Since the Obama-era Dear Colleague letter, there have been almost 500 lawsuits filed at the state or federal level by accused students. One of the most unfair—in the combination of procedures and outcome—occurred at Purdue University. A lawsuit filed in January 2017 was revived last month by an important opinion issued by the Seventh Circuit. […]
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“It’s Title IX, not Miranda,” Susan Riseling, former chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison told a conference of academic administrators in 2015. “Use what you can.” Riseling was describing a case in which a Wisconsin student had been subjected to both a criminal and a Title IX complaint. The police originally didn’t have enough […]
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A college male meets a college female, they get along well, and the male attempts to kiss the female. She pushes him away, saying it is too soon. This followed role expectations: boys took the initiative in sexual contact; girls complied or resisted, as they wished. A few days later they have sex, but his […]
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The proposed Title IX regulations released by Betsy DeVos would ensure a much fairer campus adjudication system—they’d ensure cross-examination (through a lawyer or advocate) of witnesses; access to all evidence and training material for both parties; and the presumption of innocence for the accused. It’s little wonder that groups committed to one-sided campus procedures have […]
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With the possibility of new Title IX regulations looming, defenders of the now-rescinded Obama-era guidance have aggressively sought to defend their years-long crusade against campus due process. But in several remarks last week, ex-Obama officials and their supporters provided unintentional insight on why the administration’s Title IX policy was so unfair In an interview with […]
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Many luminaries have urged us to believe whatever a woman says about her experience in sexual encounters. This view is widely held by feminists, the #metoo advocates, the Obama Department of Education, and many university administrators and bureaucrats, especially the university “equity, inclusion, and diversity” officers. Should we believe whatever a woman says? Perhaps we […]
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Megyn Kelly is of the few journalists to have consistently raised concerns about the fairness of campus Title IX tribunals. She did so at Fox, bringing attention to the egregious case at Amherst College. And she did so last week at NBC, noting that while conditions once were unfairly tilted against the accuser, “the Obama […]
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A potential draft of new federal campus sexual assault policies was leaked this week, so expect a new round of false and misleading statistics to be shared by those who claim due process “protects rapists” and “hurts victims.” Rape and sexual assault are serious offenses and shouldn’t be watered down to create a narrative that […]
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The latest Spangler Report from Yale is now out—and it portrays a deeply dangerous campus: around 1.75 percent of Yale undergraduate females as victims of sexual assault in the first six months of 2018. (That’s a violent crime rate around twice as high as that of Detroit, which the FBI rates as the nation’s most […]
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A major survey sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and conducted by YouGov shows that college students—2225 were surveyed in late January or early February, from two- and four-year institutions— strongly support due process for accused students facing Title IX tribunals. Indeed, the gap between the policies that would flow from […]
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In April of 2011, the Obama administration changed Title IX policy, pressuring colleges to adopt procedures that dramatically increased the chances of a guilty finding in sexual misconduct cases. Justice for accused males became so rare that many turned to the courts, filing suit for loss of due process. Since then, universities and colleges have […]
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Many able commenters on the #MeToo phenomenon and the sex wars miss the most vulnerable dimension of feminism. The underlying issue is that feminism has not consistently held itself to standards of logic, evidence, and rationality. In fact, the rhetoric of feminism has long utilized postmodern disavowals of evidence and logic (labeling them “masculinist”). After […]
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Reader Tom Horrell responds to Warren Farrell’s article in our first “Reader Spotlight” feature. There is a sick inevitability to all this, of course. If I see myself as Victim, then you must be Oppressor. Two sides of the same coin: one cannot exist unless matched by the other. If I see you as powerful, then I must […]
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Last week, a New Haven jury acquitted Yale student Saifullah Khan of rape. Coverage of the case provided only the latest reminder of the one-sided, often effectively misleading manner in which the mainstream media covers the issue of campus sexual assault. Because criminal charges were filed against Khan, he was entitled to constitutional protections (the […]
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“The sexual harassment racket is over,” Peggy Noonan excitedly declared in the Wall Street Journal last week. No longer need we be stumped by conundrums based on “he said/she said.” Instead, Noonan rejoices that “now predators are on notice.” Overlooked in the celebration, however, is that the presumption of innocence—long problematic in sexual harassment charges– […]
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Sociologist Emile Durkheim would find validation for his theory of deviance in the fury surrounding sexual harassment and abuse by powerful men in politics, the media, business, and academia. More than one hundred years ago, Durkheim argued that the reason acts of deviance are identified and publicly punished is because defining deviant behavior reinforces social […]
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In the mainstream and on social media, we’ve been told that all women live under constant threat and that all men are part of the problem. One columnist admonished “nice guys” were most likely responsible for the bulk of the problem and bore the responsibility for fixing it. The journalist Benjamin Law started the hashtag #How […]
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A pleasant surprise: Governor Jerry Brown has vetoed the California bill designed to protect the unfair procedures of the Obama Education Department’s guidance on how to deal with sexual misconduct on campus. His decision was explicitly based on due-process grounds. The Obama-era policies discouraged cross-examination, suggested that accusers (but not the accused) be allowed to […]
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In the debate over campus due process, it would be difficult to overstate the significance of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ George Mason speech. No comparable address occurred during the Obama years—former Education Secretary Arne Duncan largely deferred on the issue to Russlynn Ali and Catherine Lhamon, who ran the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) during […]
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Too often on campus, the best chance for a wrongfully accused student to achieve justice involves a lawsuit after the campus tribunal has done its worst. A system that uses the lowest standard of proof, allows accusers to appeal not-guilty findings, lacks mechanisms for mandatory discovery of exculpatory evidence, denies meaningful (or any) representation by […]
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Notre Dame stands to lose a Title IX case in an unusual flurry of kangaroo court blunders. It “investigated” the case and came away only with the female’s hostile emails, none of her loving ones (knowing that many emails were missing). When the male contemplated suicide, Notre Dame interpreted those thoughts as “dating violence,” and […]
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It is not too early to say that Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus by Laura Kipnis, professor of film studies at Northwestern University, will be one of the most important books of 2017. Kipnis gained some notoriety two years ago when she was hauled before her school’s Title IX investigators on a complaint […]
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A college student accused of sexual assault or harassment can have his dorm and class schedule changed without knowing who accused him or what the accusation is. An administrator at a well-regarded eastern college says this: “A student who accuses another student of violating campus policy as it relates to sexual assault or harassment may […]
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Over the last few years, we have become all but immune to what, under any other circumstances, would be a fantastic claim—that one in five female undergraduates will be victims of sexual assault. This rate would translate to several hundreds of thousands of violent crime victims (with almost all of the incidents unnoticed) annually, and, […]
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