Though federal judges tend to uphold a lot of unjust campus decisions in sex-assault cases, Judge Elizabeth Dillon, an Obama appointee, proved on December 23 that some campus procedures are just too outrageous to survive judicial review. The judge’s due process ruling came in a case out of James Madison University. (You can read her […]
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We don’t normally think of college athletes as prominent defenders of due process. Yet perhaps the highest-profile protest against the post-Dear Colleague letter demise of campus due process came last week at the University of Minnesota. Its emergence, the reaction to it, and its quick collapse speaks volumes about the relationship between due process and […]
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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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The Obama administration, acting through the Office of Civil Rights, has made a terrible mess out of sexual misconduct hearings on our campuses, but it did one good thing without thinking much about it: it targeted one university—Yale—for regular reports on how it dealt in sexual assault hearings. The reports, released by Deputy Provost Stephanie […]
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In campus sexual assault hearings, due process for accused students is rare, because of pressure from feminists and campus activists, administrators’ diffidence, and the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that minimized protections for the accused. Getting these cases into court for a due process trial is even rarer, but now the first such trial […]
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Calls for additional or new “campus climate surveys” have been a regular feature the post-2011 war on campus due process. The White House has produced a template that colleges can copy. The Gillibrand/McCaskill Campus Safety and Accountability Act (co-sponsored by such Republicans as Marco Rubio, Charles Grassley, and Kelly Ayotte) contains a provision seeking to […]
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The prospect of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) being sued has been much in the news lately. Talk began with an announcement from FIRE—on the fifth anniversary of the issuance of the “Dear Colleague” letter—that it was soliciting an accused student to sue OCR. Attorney Andrew Miltenberg then filed two such suits, on behalf […]
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Have you noticed how many of the campus accusations of rape/sexual misconduct are reported after the 3rd, 4th, or 5th sexual encounter? It’s possible, of course that rape-minded males on campus like to let a relationship proceed a while before forcing themselves on a woman. Or it could be that something happens in the midst of a […]
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Twenty-two Senators have asked the Appropriations Committee to increase the budget of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) by almost 30%. All of those Senators are Democrats except for Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada. OCR has pressured colleges and high schools to adopt unconstitutional speech codes. It also has pressured school districts to […]
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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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By KC Johnson The University of Cincinnati has a fascinating response to a recent lawsuit filed by two students alleging serious misconduct by UC and several of its administrators in sexual assault proceedings: “Even accepting Plaintiffs’ allegations as true, they received constitutional due process protections.” Since UC informed them of the charges, and gave them a hearing, […]
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By Peter Wood In 2014 Senator Marco Rubio lent his support to CASA, the Campus Accountability and Safety Act—the effort by Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill and New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to strip the due process rights of students accused of sexual assault. The bill died that year but McCaskill and Gillibrand brought it back […]
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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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At a House oversight hearing last week, Representative Jared Polis (D-Colorado) seemed deeply troubled by two arguments raised by FIRE’s Joseph Cohn: that trained police, rather than campus bureaucrats, are better equipped to investigate felony offenses; and that the current campus tribunals deny meaningful due process for students accused of sexual assault. In response, Polis […]
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On Friday, a federal court filing revealed that University of Michigan had settled its lawsuit with Drew Sterrett. The case, first exposed by Emily Yoffe in her sensational Slate article, featured Michigan branding Sterrett a rapist despite overlooking critical exculpatory evidence (including from the roommates of Sterrett and the accuser) and very troubling conduct by […]
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The Education Department, where I used to work, is becoming more and more extreme in how it misinterprets and misapplies federal law. For example, the Education Department has thumbed its nose at federal court rulings by wrongly creating entitlements for people who make false discrimination and harassment complaints—even though such baseless complaints can make life […]
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However harmful the effects of the “Dear Colleague” letter to colleges and universities from the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, the document is a floor, not a ceiling, to OCR’s efforts to weaken campus due process. Resolution letters between OCR and various universities have allowed the agency to go well beyond the “Dear Colleague” […]
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Here are two troubling developments regarding campus due process from the Upper Midwest: Inside Higher Ed featured remarks from Susan Riseling, chief of police at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, regarding the intersection between campus police and Title IX responsibilities. Riseling told attendees at the International Association of College Law Enforcement Administrators conference that police chiefs […]
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Kafka was born too early to write about Amherst College. At campus hearings on claims of sexual assault, procedures are relentlessly stacked again males and evidence of innocence doesn’t count. Amherst expelled a student for committing rape—despite text messages from the accuser, sent immediately after the alleged assault, (1) telling one student that she had […]
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How Accusers Play the Drinking Game at Washington and Lee As you’ll see from the this list of stories, the male students who have the resources to challenge the illegal bullying of their constitutional rights do so by filing a due process lawsuit, like the one facing Washington and Lee. The facts, by this point, […]
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The Office of Civil Rights’ mandated procedures for investigating sexual assault are tilted heavily against the accused party. The institution can hire “neutral fact-finders” who produce the equivalent of a grand jury presentment, deny the accused an advisor of his choice, add witnesses that the accused student does not request, forbid the students from cross-examining […]
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Six years ago, Duke University suffered a high-profile humiliation from which it is still struggling to recover. Students on Duke’s lacrosse team were accused of a brutal sexual assault on a local stripper who had been hired to perform at a party. The charges were false. But in the interval between the initial headlines and […]
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Believe it or not, there is at least one person on the Yale campus who has received less due process than Patrick Witt, the former college quarterback and Rhodes scholarship applicant whose reputation has been effectively destroyed by Yale and the New York Times. That information came last Tuesday in an e-mail from Yale president Richard […]
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http://www.openmarket.org/2011/10/24/senate-bill-would-further-undermine-due-process-on-campus/
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The Board of Regents and officials of the University of Wisconsin system have recently proposed two sweeping changes to the system’s student misconduct codes. The first change is a new code covering student misconduct outside of university property (UWS 18). The second involves some major changes in the present Student Nonacademic Disciplinary Code, UWS 17. […]
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