During her nearly four years running Barack Obama’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Catherine Lhamon was nothing if not consistent. She sought to use the power of her office—chiefly by threatening to withhold federal funds—to force colleges and universities to change their campus sexual assault policies. Every substantive change demanded by the Obama administration made […]
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James Madison University, a public university in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, is probably not a school you would think of as one where rampaging ideology against male students would lead to a huge legal fight. But that’s what happened a few years ago. Now, a student who was wrongfully punished is on the verge of collecting almost […]
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Nearly 60 Democratic legislators tweeted criticism of Education Secretary Betsy Devos’ speech, which advocated a fairer approach and more respect for due process in campus Title IX tribunals. The preferred adjectives included “terrible,” “despicable,” “insulting, “perverse,” “appalling,” “disgraceful,” “shameful,” and “dangerous. No congressional Democrat, in any way, praised her remarks, which insisted on the rights […]
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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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The lawsuit filed by Northwestern Title IX accuser “Nola Hartley” against best-selling author Laura Kipnis (Unwanted Advances) has attracted substantial attention from both the mainstream media and from commentators; the two best pieces (taking differing approaches to the lawsuit’s merits) come from Robby Soave and Michelle Goldberg. The Kipnis book looks primarily at four cases—one […]
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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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In a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights, Yale became the nation’s only university required to document all sexual assault allegations on campus. The reports, prepared by Yale deputy provost Stephanie Spangler, are generally bare-bones (and became even more so last year after Spangler announced she’d decided to supply less information about […]
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As the Obama administration draws to a close, opponents of campus due process have launched an aggressive public relations campaign on behalf of their agenda, lest change comes with a new regime in the White House. The highest-profile effort came from Joe Biden, who penned an open letter to the presidents of the nation’s colleges […]
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In the latest expansion of the intent of Title IX, a University of Kentucky Professor drew punishment this month, partly, he says, because he was found to have engaged in “sexual misconduct” by singing a Beach Boys song at a university gathering in China last year. The professor, Buck Ryan, who directs the University’s Scripps […]
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Since 2011, the federal government has made successful and devastating efforts to undermine civil liberties on campuses. The surprise outcome of the presidential election raises at least the possibility that this illicit campaign, based on a vast extension of Title IX, will be reversed. Thousands of students accused of sexual misconduct but denied due process […]
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In a first for the Obama-era Office for Civil Rights, the Education Department’s OCR found in favor of an accused student who filed a Title IX complaint against Wesley College. At the least, after five years, we’ve finally found a case whose facts were so outrageous that even an OCR notoriously indifferent to due process […]
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The bizarre procedures of Yale’s sprawling sexual assault bureaucracy may well be the worst in the nation. We have come to realize this because Yale is the only university to publicly document all campus allegations of sexual assault, the result of a 2012 agreement with the Obama administration. Reports issued by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler […]
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Friday morning brought important news from the Second Circuit, which vacated a decision from Judge Jesse Furman in the Doe v. Columbia U. case, giving the accused student a rare new chance to prove his university denied him a fair proceeding. It was the first decision by an Appeals Court to deal with campus sexual […]
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Yale has brought controversial charges against two star athletes in recent years, both on the eve of their biggest games: quarterback Patrick Witt in 2014 just before the Yale-Harvard game (and when he was up for a Rhodes scholarship) and Jack Montague, captain of the Ivy-League championship basketball tram just before this year’s rare appearance […]
Read MoreAmong the many anti-campus due process groups that have appeared in the past five years, the most prominent is Know Your IX, co-founded by two self-described sexual assault victims, Dana Bolger and Alexandra Brodsky. The group has an active presence on social media; trains activists to crusade against due process at their home campuses; and […]
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The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has just dipped its oar in the dank water of Title IX. The AAUP’s draft of its new document, The History, Uses, and Abuses of Title IX, leaves much to be desired. But welcome to the fight, AAUP. We’ve been wondering when you would show up. From 1972 […]
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Max Stern, the lawyer for the expelled Yale basketball captain Jack Montague, has spoken out, announcing that he will sue Yale on behalf of Montague in April, and clarifying some details in the case, including a very surprising one: that the aggrieved female did not file the sexual misconduct complaint. In his telling, Montague had […]
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Yale is the only university that regularly issues reports on its handling of sexual assault complaints, the result of a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The university is also unusual in reporting so many sexual complaints, the result of its peculiar decision to broaden the campus definition of “sexual assault” […]
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John K. Wilson, editor of The Academe Blog, severely criticized Peter Wood’s January 13 article, “What Candidates Can Do for Higher Education Now.” His text is below, followed by Peter Wood’s reply. By John K. Wilson National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood has a column at Minding the Campus today arguing for an 7-point plan for […]
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By KC Johnson The Chronicle of Higher Education has received a good deal of attention for putting together a website cataloguing all the Title IX complaints currently pending with the Obama administration’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). But the site should mostly be seen as a concrete demonstration of how little we know about these […]
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A good rule of thumb when considering campus due process matters: If the Senate’s two most ardent foes of campus civil liberties, Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill oppose something, the measure is probably worth a good look. The Safe Campus Act, which recently received criticism from the two senators, deserves more than a look. It […]
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Some coincidences are less coincidental than others are. Northwestern University recently investigated professor Laura Kipnis, regarding complaints that an essay of hers had violated students’ legal rights. Meanwhile, a committee of the Wisconsin state legislature voted to let the University of Wisconsin choose, as a matter of policy, whether its professors would enjoy the protections […]
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Imagine a hypothetical gourmet grocery store chain — let’s call it Wholly Wholesome Foods — that serves haute cuisine specialties at sushi/deli/lunch counters only in its stores located in upscale neighborhoods. Now imagine the long zealous arm of federal, state, and local enforcers accusing WhoWhoFoo of discriminating against inner city residents and forcing it to […]
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Few figures involved in the Duke lacrosse case behaved more disgracefully than Wendy Murphy, an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law. A frequent TV commentator on the case, she earned a reputation for defending Mike Nifong’s prosecution through myriad errors of fact, misstatements of the law, and deeply offensive statements such as […]
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In this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Joseph Cohn, director of policy at FIRE, summarizes the due process implications of a letter sent to colleges and universities last April by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. As was widely reported at the time, the letter instructs schools to adopt the lowest standard of […]
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Using federal statistics, Laura Norén has prepared a series of graphics showing gender distribution among recent recipients of undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D./professional degrees. The charts are visually striking, especially since all three sets of charts show movement in an identical direction. According to Norén, by 2020, women are projected to earn 61 percent of all […]
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The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has entered into its latest Title IX-related agreement with Xavier University. Unlike the OCR’s agreement with Yale, which used a manufactured controversy to weaken the due process rights of the university’s students, at least at Xavier the OCR involved itself only in response […]
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First it was gender quotas for the sciences–and now it’s gender quotas for philosophy. Two philosophy professors are calling on their colleagues to boycott academic conferences that don’t feature at least one woman as a keynote speaker.
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When college women study science, they tend to gravitate toward biology—about 58 percent of all bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in biology go to women. In contrast, women earn some 17 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science and just over 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees in physical sciences and mathematics. The likely reason for this, found in the study The Mathematics […]
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Yale and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights recently announced a settlement of a Title IX complaint brought by several Yale students alleging a “hostile environment” on the campus toward women. (The idea that any contemporary Ivy League campus is hostile to women is nothing short of preposterous.) The settlement’s terms included the […]
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