Woodbridge Hall, meeting room where Yale’s top officials make decisions.
K.C. Johnson, at Minding the Campus, describes the truly Orwellian system of adjudicating complaints of sexual assault which has evolved at Yale as the result of threats of sanctions by Barack Obama and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights.
Yale, as part of an agreement with OCR (Office of Civil Rights), revised its procedures and promised biannual reports from Yale deputy provost Stephanie Spangler.
Over the past three years, these Spangler documents have provided a first-hand illustration of what passes for due process at one of the nation’s leading universities. From them, we learned that more than a half-dozen Yale students (including former quarterback Patrick Witt) had been found culpable for sexual assault under “informal complaint†procedures that provide no grounds for an accused student to present evidence of his innocence. The latest Spangler report has now been released. It suggests that due process still stands in short supply on the New Haven campus. …
Seven cases this semester have gone through the “informal†process—which can best be seen as a kind of “Scarlet Letter†approach. That is: given the limitations on the accused student’s ability to present evidence, it’s almost impossible for an “informal complaint†to end without the accused student being branded a rapist. But beyond the branding, Yale allows only limited punishment through the informal procedure. Of the six students (one case remains pending) who faced charges of sexual assault through the “informal complaint†process, each received the same punishment—“counseling†and a prohibition on contacting the accuser.
For one student last spring, the allegation was just the beginning. Yale’s “formal complaint†procedure prevents the accused from having an attorney as part of the process; brands the accused a rapist based on a 50.01 percent finding from a panel specially trained panel; and denies the accused any right to cross-examine the accuser. Even under these guilt-tilting procedures, one accused student was found not culpable—meaning that Yale’s disciplinary panel concluded that it was more likely than not he was the subject of a false allegation.
The outcome of the case? The accused student was punished. He received a no-contact order with his accuser (there was no reciprocal order)—meaning that if the two happen to enroll in the same course, the accused student would need to drop the class; or if the two happened to be assigned to the same dorm, the accused student would have to move.
Yale also referred the accused student for “sexual consent training.†(Yale’s website contains no description of what this “training†entails, but here’s a summary from a feminist blog.) Again: Yale concluded that it was more likely than not that the accused student was the victim of a false allegation. Yet even though Yale’s own accuser-friendly procedures concluded that it was more likely than not the accuser leveled a false allegation, the accused was punished, while the accuser received no punishment of any sort.
In the several years of Spangler reports, there never has been any indication that Yale has punished even one student for filing a false claim of sexual assault. …
One of the Title IX cases from the spring provides a sense of the Orwellian nature of the Title IX coordinator’s work. “A third party reported,†according to Spangler, “that more than one female [Yale] student, whom the reporter would not identify, [emphasis added] was sexually assaulted by a male Yale student.â€
Or, in plain English, a Yale student is now being investigated as a serial rapist, with the possibility of sanctions—even though none of the females he allegedly raped have filed a complaint, or have even been identified. How any student could defend himself against such a charge is unclear.
Read the whole thing, and feel your blood run cold.
GoneWithTheWind
Universities should not be investigating crimes nor punishing crimes. If a crime is committed the police should investigate, a DA should prosecute, a jury should decide guilt and the law and the judge should set the punishment. Anything else is unconstitutional.
What is really going on here is punishing based on gender not on criminal acts. These cases are more about regret the next day or next week or even in some cases the next year. There have been cases where the girl has used these charges in revenge over a breakup. Since this couldn’t be accomplished using the constitutional system and extra-constitutional system is required. But how? Well, first you hype the “crime” and distort the statistics. Then you assemble activists to demand attention and redress. Then you create committees and boards of likeminded people to create pseudo-regulations to accomplish the goal. Sounds like How to get around the Constitution 101.
Please Leave a Comment!