Sexual assault reeducation
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is taking blistering heat for daring question the sanctity of college sexual assault tribunals as molded by her predecessors, her stance the more easily pilloried given the confessed “grab-them-by the . . .” conduct of the man in the White House she works for.
Stand strong there, Madame Secretary — because it’s about time someone in charge reined in a discipline regime gone destructively off track.
DeVos spent many hours Thursday hearing as assault survivors, accused students and university officials attested to the toxic results of shunting educators into the no-win position of deciding guilt and innocence, when, in every other realm of American life, that’s the justice system’s job to do.
The current system is a tragedy wrapped inside a farce. Based on mere preponderance of evidence — often, one participant’s word against another’s — students, usually male, have found themselves suspended or expelled as rapists.
Accusers, usually female, have meanwhile filed complaints by the hundreds with the federal government charging their schools with flubbing the complex responsibility of weighing their charges.
No doubt, countless assaults occur on campuses annually. That is a horror that it’s the government’s high responsibility to arrest. But Title IX, the federal law guaranteeing education and athletic participation free of gender-based discrimination, is the wrong legal tool to use.
Panels of deans are ill-equipped to pursue witnesses or track down students’ digital trails — never mind meticulously assemble such evidence into a coherent case and then adjudicate it, all under threat of losing federal funds should students filing charges complain to the feds that the panels are insufficiently zealous.
New York has no better icon of the system’s savagery than Emma Sulkowicz, who dragged a mattress around Columbia University for months to protest the school’s failure to expel her alleged assailant — who, though absolved by the university, found his reputation in tatters. He too filed a Title IX complaint, in federal court (and lost).
Columbia meanwhile remains the subject of investigations by the U.S. Department of Education into an allegedly hostile campus environment for women. You would think the Taliban had descended on Morningside Heights.
Importantly, DeVos Thursday reiterated her agency’s commitment to enforce the federal law.
But, with the aid of deputy Candice Jackson, she made clear she plans to correct guidance crafted by the Obama administration that asks college administrators to establish regimes to adjudicate sexual assault allegations lodged by one student against another.
Jackson poisoned the waters ahead of Thursday’s summit by claiming “the accusations — 90% of them — fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’ ”
Alcohol-soaked campus culture is a huge problem that young men and women alike must reckon with. But Jackson’s gross oversimplification, for which she later apologized, is the exact wrong way to set a new tone.
Going forward, the Trump administration’s guidance must return professional law enforcement to its proper place, including open proceedings where clear and convincing evidence is the standard of proof.
Our nation’s education leaders not long ago let their understandable sympathies for victims of sexual assault lure them into creating a parallel, Potemkin justice system. Students deserve justice as real as the violations suffered.