One of the biggest issues I’ve had with colleges and universities over the years hasn’t been the activism or curriculum pushing a leftist agenda. I despise that, to be sure, but there was a much bigger issue in my mind.
See, during the Obama years, Title IX was twisted and mangled beyond its original purpose and instead used to deny some students basic human rights. What started as a response to allegations of rampant sexual assault on campus ended up becoming something else.
For a time, that changed. Now, it seems it’s changing again, and not for the better.
In 2015, student-athlete Grant Neal was expelled by Colorado State University Pueblo for raping a fellow student. There was just one problem: the alleged victim repeatedlyesaid, “I’m fine and I wasn’t raped.”
“One day I woke up and I had all my dreams in front of me,” Neal told Reason, “[but that was] yanked away from me for no justifiable reason.”
The hundreds of horror stories like Neal’s are what prompted the Donald Trump administration to institute a series of reforms in 2020, intended to protect due process rights for accused students in campus sexual assault proceedings while ensuring victims were able to pursue justice. But the Joe Biden administration has just announced plans to roll back many of these protections — prompting widespread concern over due process rights and whether mob justice might make a comeback on campus.
Now, I remember Neal’s case quite well. He engaged in a consensual sexual relationship that someone else thought constituted rape despite not having bothered to get the details.
They just assumed it was sexual assault and responded accordingly.
Now, this wouldn’t be a terrible thing in and of itself if the process were remotely fair and impartial. An investigation would have talked to Neal, talked to the woman in question, and determined that while the report might have been well-intentioned, it was incorrect, thus allowing everyone to go on with their lives.
Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because of a screwed-up system that the Biden administration wants to bring back.
On 19 April, the Department of Education unveiled significant changes to the existing rules which govern these proceedings, formally taking effect at the beginning of August. These changes include removing the right of accused students to a live hearing where they can have a representative cross-examine their accuser, as well as allowing colleges to return to a “single investigator” model, where one individual can investigate the case and render a conclusion. In other words: be prosecutor, judge, and jury all at once.
The changes would require most colleges to return to using a “preponderance of the evidence” standard to decide these matters, which only needs 51% certainty of guilt to find a student responsible. Another development would be the removal of the requirement that colleges present the charges against accused students in writing at the beginning of an investigation.
The White House has argued that these changes are intended to “protect all students and employees from all sex discrimination prohibited under Title IX […] by restoring and strengthening full protection from sexual violence and other sex-based harassment”.
Now, anyone with a moral compass would surely want to ensure that genuine victims of sexual abuse are treated with dignity and receive the justice they deserve. But the spectre of expulsions without a live hearing under such a low standard of proof is raising serious concerns among legal experts and civil libertarians.
Let’s understand that we’re talking about due process rights here. While this isn’t a criminal complaint, the ramifications for someone’s life can be significant. Getting expelled from a university doesn’t exactly make it easier to get into another school, and if you’re looking at something like medical or law school afterward, give it up. The impact is more than some money like in a civil case.
It’s even cost people their lives in a far more literal sense.
And these systems are horrific, particularly for men at colleges that have swallowed the “believe all women” mantra wholeheartedly.
What many schools did, and what they’ll be returning to, is a system where a single party investigates the incident and reaches a determination, all without any real defense being possible by the accused.
We’re told, both then and now, that we need these protections for young women, yet there’s also evidence the whole thing was predicated on a lie. A woman claims she was raped and that her university didn’t do enough to support her, which predicated the Obama administration to take action, yet her story really doesn’t hold up well to examination.
And this is what we’re going back to.
So here’s the situation as it currently stands.
Young men aren’t going to college at increasing rates. Fewer of them are completeing college, too, at least in relation to total numbers of graduates. Campuses are mostly women who will then, in turn, find it harder to find mates with similar educations and careers, and the answer to this situation is to make it less likely young men will go to or complete college?
Absolutely brilliant.
Look, even discounting all that, due process rights are human rights. People have a right to be afforded those basic protections. They have a right to defend themselves and to challenge their accusers. I get the argument that it’s traumatic for rape victims, but seeing justice prevail mitigates a lot of that. What’s also traumatic is for innocent men to be kicked out of their schools because of BS complaints leading to them being railroaded.
And that’s what we’re going back to.
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