Real March madness
Ahigh-profile case at Yale reveals a dangerous trend afoot on America’s college campuses: Rewriting definitions of sexual consent, then cramming student complaints into tribunals ill-equipped to determine guilt or innocence. Politicians and administrators rushing with the best of intentions to attack campus climates hostile to women must closely study the case of expelled former basketball team captain Jack Montague.
Not even his accuser suggests Montague committed rape, by Connecticut’s or any state’s standard. But under Yale’s sexual assault policy, students must obtain “a clear ‘yes’ ” prior to “each specific sexual activity.”
Under that definition, a college official decided, upon hearing a female student’s report a year after the fact, that Montague had likely committed sexual misconduct during the fourth of four nights spent in bed with her.
Was it because one of the two was inebriated? Because both were? Because she answered advances with silence instead of an audible “yes”? Some other reason altogether?
We do not know, and will never — never mind that Yale’s school motto is “lux et veritas,” or “light and truth.” A panel of students, faculty and staff — all sworn to secrecy under federal law — heard the claims. She said he had failed to obtain consent. He said she had provided it.
Using a standard far lower than the courts’, the tribunal found it likelier than not Montague had failed to obtain unambiguous consent before sexual intercourse. A majority recommended expulsion, punishment upheld by administrators.
This is madness. Its vortex now sucks in all who come near:
Montague, booted out without public explanation in the last semester of his senior year, on the cusp of his team’s NCAA tournament entry. (They shocked Baylor Thursday in a first-round upset.)
Montague’s teammates, who wore shirts defending him at a Harvard game — and then found their images plastered all over campus on flyers screaming: “STOP SUPPORTING A RAPIST.”
Yale deans, who, under steady fire from activists for being weak on sexual assault, imposed consequences far beyond those prescribed by federal Title IX law and impossible to apply responsibly.
Those officials now face a threatened lawsuit from Montague, who says that not only did they kick him out arbitrarily, on her word versus his; they did nothing to protect his reputation from public accusations of committing a crime that did not occur.
Now, New York, consider the implications as every college in the state imposes standards similar to Yale’s, consistent with a 2015 state law championed by Gov. Cuomo.
Those colleges already carry the unmanageable burden of enforcing Title IX, which guarantees students a campus climate free of sexual threats by way of obligating schools to adjudicate reports of misconduct — including collecting and evaluating complex evidence they have no hope of properly handling.
While Title IX requires only that college officials safely separate students from those they accuse, pressure runs high to expel regardless of the investigation’s outcome. Look no further than Columbia University, where a student who dragged around her mattress for months to demand her non-assailant’s ejection may be gone, but a U.S. federal investigation endures.
New York encourages but, under federal law, cannot obligate students reporting sexual assault to go to the police, where such claims could have hope of meaningful investigation and procedural protections for the accuser and accused alike.
Now add to this toxic brew the unenforceable new standard that affirmative consent must be granted for each and every intimate act, and see the hopelessness of determining with any clarity who did what to whom when.
If there’s one lesson for New York from the exalted quads of Yale, it’s that any sexual assault severe enough to merit expulsion equally demands an immediate phone call to the police.