It is unlikely that Ms. Ali has ever sat at desk like mine, on the phone with a parent who cannot believe I allowed his daughter to drink, much less allowed (or not allowed — always a difficult point to discuss) a “boy” to do the things her account reports. Or a parent who wants to know why I have sent her son home without so much as a hearing, an action we call “interim removal,” while we investigate these claims.

“Because the alleged victim is afraid of seeing him, and the Office for Civil Rights has made it clear that our process must support the alleged victim in this way” is not an answer that satisfies an angry mother who believes that her son (1) has been unjustly accused, (2) has not been given a chance to defend himself (yet), and 3) may find his ability to succeed academically compromised by his absence from classes during this investigation.  Has Ms. Ali ever had a parent, in a rageful voice, point out the inequity of all of this? Because I’ve experienced that on several occasions as I have tried to do what OCR expects from a “victim-friendly” policy.

The author writes that experienced human judgment is a better approach to getting to the bottom of sexual assault charges than this “victim-friendly” rule: “I do not appreciate having my hands tied by the presumption of guilt the Dear Colleague Letter portrays.”

The OCR regulations thus harm not only students and their families but also the campus administrators trying to sort out these painful situations.

Keep in mind that “sexual harassment” codes extend to a wide range of behavior that is not sexual: namely, creating a “hostile environment.” The “hostile environment” category embraces speech and makes this an academic freedom concern, according to both AAUP and FIRE.

How low does this bar go? Pretty darn low. Consider a case from North Dakota where a male student (Caleb Warner) was suspended for three years after a female student accused him of rape. The police later found evidence that this woman had made a false accusation (they never happen, right?) and “lodged criminal charges [against her] . . . for filing a false police report.”

So the male student was let back on campus, right? No. Based on the “preponderance of evidence” letter just issued by OCR, North Dakota State still refused to re-consider the case. In the administration’s opinion, there was no “substantial new information” (bold for emphasis) and “Warner’s three-year suspension ‘was not a legal process but an educational one.’”

It’s a bad turn of events because in 2003 the same Office of Civil Rights was concerned with the “convict first and fast” attitude of harassment officers in areas of speech. In 2003, the Office of Civil Rights issued a statement clarifying that enforcement did not require campuses to abandon the First Amendment. Today’s OCR seems to think its lower standard is just fine, thank you. It will apply not only in cases of alleged rape but also “expressive activities” (speech).

This gutting of due process will leave administrations with the power to blur the difference between rape (a crime that must be proved, except on campuses) and innocent speech, however controversial. In either case, due process is there to prevent Star Chambers from walling themselves off from the rest of the world and declaring their authority Supreme on campus. So now places like North Dakota will stonewall and say: we don’t deal with legal processes, only educational ones.

AAUP and FIRE have fought so many of these cases that they have lost their shock value.  Indifference breeds the arrogance of power. Fortunately, faculty/staff/students can organize or speak out. In some cases, they can bring in the AAUP and FIREs of the world and “sue the bastards.” Perhaps that is the only thing that Power understands.

For more, read this FIRE FAQ on the new OCR mandates

HT: Adam Kissel

What next?” asked “Lamar.”  “An anti-tobacco workshop, a recycling workshop, an obesity workshop, a vegetarianism workshop?  Already PETA made the college dining halls start a `Meatless Monday.’”

It may come to that.  One neighboring community college just took an institutional position condemning the immigration law in another state.  Apparently, embedding the progressive agenda in textbooks and curriculum is not enough in our postmodern world.  Walter Truett Anderson says, “In education, postmodernism rejects the notion that the purpose of education is primarily to train a child’s cognitive capacity for reason . . . .  [Instead, postmodern education] is to take an essentially indeterminate being and give it a social identity.”  Mandatory workshops, it seems, are intended to bring that “indeterminate being” into conformance with “the campus culture” and “principles of community.”  The sign on this clubhouse reads “No Unprogressives Allowed.”

Just yesterday, “Jennifer” came to me desperate to get out of her Women’s History class.  “I admit, I thought it would be an easy A,” she said, “but I also wanted to learn about the Enlightenment, and all I heard was how the Enlightenment  oppressed women.  Help!”

Sorry, “Lamar” and “Jennifer;” you might have thought it died with the millennium but the baleful Political Correctness Zombie still stalks the halls of academe.

The policy — which FIRE describes as “vastly overbroad, illogical, impractical, but also insane” –

• claims that “perceived power differentials may create an unintentional atmosphere of coercion”
• transforms students of both sexes into unwitting rapists simply because of the “atmosphere” or because one or more students are “intoxicated,” no matter the degree, and
• establishes unfair rules for judging sexual misconduct accusations.

Rape and sexual misconduct are grave offenses. But what’s wrong with Duke that it can’t rationally address them? As FIRE’s Robert Shibley sensibly concludes, “students deserve a policy under which true offenders will be punished but the innocent have nothing to fear.”

See also the memo notifying employees that they must document all mileage traveled for university business, in order to “help the campus to achieve its goal of being a national leader in sustainability.”

NAS of course has also dealt with these problems. Our statement Sexual Harassment and Academic Freedom showed how the rights of individuals can be violated by misguided efforts to combat sexual harassment. In Tolerance, Diversity, Respect, OR ELSE, Williams Chokes Up, and Snitch Studies at Cal Poly, we highlighted freedom-threatening bias reporting systems at William & Mary, Williams College, and Cal Poly, respectively. And this spring, in a series of articles (beginning with Free to Agree), NAS exposed Virginia Tech’s faculty promotion and tenure policy that included a commitment-to-diversity litmus test.

We are welcome FIRE’s new guide for protecting individual rights on campus, and we hope to see more and more college administrators heeding the counsel therein.