Restoring due process on our campuses

[TalkRadio]

The recent announcement by U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on handling sexual misconduct claims on college campuses led to a chorus of vitriolic and at times vicious attacks. Advocate Annie Clark denounced it as “a blatant attack on the civil rights of survivors.” The group Know Your IX declared that DeVos was against equality on campuses and was actively seeking to “help abusers and rapists.”

During the Obama administration, I was one of the academics who publicly criticized the “Dear Colleague” letter of Russlynn Ali, then assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education under President Obama. Ali informed schools that they had to either strip their students and staff of due process protections or face the crippling loss of federal funding. Notably, Ali never submitted this massive policy change for “notice and comment” compliance under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The Obama administration demanded more cases and more expulsions from colleges. While saying that the curtailing of rights would make it easier for women to allege assaults, it was clearly making it easier to find guilt. For example, before the change, universities generally applied standards of proof requiring a “clear preponderance” or “clear and convincing evidence.” While not as demanding as “beyond a reasonable doubt,” the standard assured that a student would not be expelled for a sexual assault without a solid evidentiary record.

The Obama administration demanded the reduction of the standard to a mere “preponderance of the evidence,” or just slightly above a 50-50 determination. Since these disputes are often a “he said, she said” dispute, that means that a conviction can be based on the accuser’s account with even the slightest additional support.

https://jonathanturley.org/2017/09/14/125657/#more-125657

 

[Freudian_Slit]

https://jonathanturley.org/2017/09/14/125657/#more-125657

Get a blog, jackass.

 

[TalkRadio]

Get a blog, jackass.

^^^ Rob, Luk or Ferm?

Hey, Rob! Tell us all about your 15 years of excellence & your 6th place finish in the recent GB Hall of Fame election. You'll always be AJ's & Que's bitch.

Hey, Luk! Tell us all about your never ending search for your manhood & your 9th place finish in the recent GB Hall of Fame election.

Hey, Ferm! Tell us all about your never ending search for a man you'll never be able to keep.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Colgate University was recently investigated by the Office for Civil Rights for potential race discrimination, a Title VI violation, in its sexual assault adjudication process. The university was cleared, in April, on the grounds that the numbers did not allow OCR to conclude that race was a statistically significant factor in Colgate's adjudications—in any given year the number of men of any race referred for formal hearings was in the single digits. (The investigation does not appear to have examined any individual cases or otherwise reach beyond this statistical analysis.) But the report did bring those statistics to light, a rarity: In the 2013–14 academic year, 4.2 percent of Colgate's students were black. According to the university's records, in that year black male students were accused of 50 percent of the sexual violations reported to the university, and they made up 40 percent of the students formally adjudicated.

[The emphasis is mine.]

As best we can tell, Colgate isn't an outlier. Yoffe notes that male students of color are "vastly overrepresented in the cases I've tracked." Harvard University Law Professors Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk, who pay attention to Title IX cases and have written about the lack of due process for accused students, share this impression. I do as well.

http://reason.com/blog/2017/09/14/we-need-to-talk-about-black-students-bei