Will Trump End Campus Kangaroo Courts? Democratic senators, a New Jersey task force and even the ABA mobilize against due process. By KC Johnson
https://www.wsj.com/articles/will-trump-end-campus-kangaroo-courts-1499188446
Mr. Johnson is a Brooklyn College historian and co-author, with Stuart Taylor, of “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities” (Encounter, 2017).
Is the Education Department preparing to dial back the Obama administration’s assault on campus due process? In late June, Candice Jackson, who in April became acting head of the department’s Office for Civil Rights, made her first public remarks about the regulatory regime she inherited. Ms. Jackson said she is examining her predecessors’ work but offered no specifics about when, or if, Obama-era mandates will be changed.
Beginning in 2011, the Obama administration used Title IX—the federal law banning sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funds—to pressure colleges and universities into adopting new procedures for handling sexual-misconduct complaints. At most schools, accused students already faced secret tribunals that lacked basic due-process protections. But the Education Department mandated even more unfairness. It ordered schools to lower the standard of proof to “preponderance of the evidence” instead of the “clear and convincing evidence” standard that some schools had used. It required schools to permit accusers to appeal not-guilty findings and discouraged allowing students under investigation to cross-examine their accusers.
As a result, scores of students have sued their colleges, alleging they were wrongfully accused. They have won more than 50 decisions in state and federal court since 2012, while nearly 40 complaints have been dismissed or decided in the colleges’ favor.
Ms. Jackson has already reversed another Obama-era policy that sought to tip the scales in favor of accusers. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed revealed that her predecessor, Catherine Lhamon, had ordered that whenever someone filed a Title IX complaint against a school with the Education Department, the civil-rights office would investigate every sexual-assault allegation there over several years. The shift sometimes led to reopening cases in which accused students already had been cleared. Ms. Jackson argued last week that this policy—which Ms. Lhamon never announced publicly—treated “every complaint as a fishing expedition through which our field investigators have been told to keep searching until you find a violation rather than go where the evidence takes them.” CONTINUE AT SITE
These first signs of renewed fairness have elicited strong protests. Last week 34 Democratic senators, led by Washington’s Patty Murray, sent a letter to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos accusing her of endorsing “diminished” enforcement of federal civil-rights laws. The senators did not even make a pretense of caring about due process for the accused. Congressional Republicans have mostly remained silent.
Late last month a task force appointed by Gov. Chris Christie released a report on how New Jersey institutions should respond to sexual assault on campus. The panel, dominated by academic administrators and victim advocates, based most of its work on the assumption that university investigations are meant to validate accusations rather than test them. CONTINUE AT SITE
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