With all this talk of the DoE rescinding its “Dear Colleague” letter that prompted so much of the anti-male due-process suppression in sexual assault cases, I have to wonder:
Can someone actually explain why these cases are being investigated and “tried” by university disciplinary boards rather than being reported to the local or state police (and not the university police, who aren’t equipped for this type of crime) so that the can be properly investigated and tried in regular courts of law where most sexual assault cases are handled?
I mean, look, university disciplinary boards are for investigating and punishing academic misconduct, not criminal misconduct. I sat on a university disciplinary board once as a student member, in a case where three students were accused of cheating on an exam. It was open and shut — even now I feel I’m bound by the rules set forth for that committee, and I can’t talk about it in detail, but the evidence was clear that two of them had been copying from one of them, and the worst part was, all three of them got the wrong answers anyway. They all failed the course and, I believe, were suspended for a semester.* That is the correct and proper use of a university disciplinary board.
But rape is not academic misconduct. If a student accuses another student of it, their due-process rights are far better protected by real judges, prosecutors, and juries, than by university committees who have a jones for punishing males simply because they are male and feel that they have license to do so because a former Secretary of Education said, gee, maybe you should do this, because if you don’t, we might start restricting your federal funding.**
Every male student who has been kicked out of school by a university disciplinary committee for alleged rape since the Obama DoE sent out that egregious letter should be suing the school for all it’s worth, and demanding his day in court.
And the states that are looking at codifying the “Dear Colleague” letter into law — I’m looking at YOU, California — might want to take a step back from the precipice before they fall off of it. Because, if universities can set up their own quasi-legal tribunals, suppress due process, and make their verdicts stick, what is stopping citizens from setting up Government Disciplinary Committees and finding state officials guilty in absentia of all kinds of misfeasance and malfeasance? And then making their verdicts stick, at gunpoint?
No wonder blue states have so much riding on abolishing the First and Second Amendments.
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* And I know that caused at least one of them a problem, because he was here on a student visa that required him to be enrolled full-time while he was in the country (and he was the one who was appealing the “F” grade handed out by the instructor, for that reason). Sucked to be him.
** Which raises another question, which is, “Why do we have a Department of Education that is funding state universities and putting them in this sort of a position in the first place?”