But you do not have the right to attend the college of your choice.
Also, I wonder if your concern extends to less heinous crimes. If you told your boss that your coworker is stealing office supplies and that coworker is fired immediately, have anyone’s rights been violated? Assume that this is exactly what the company handbook says will happen.
The fundamental question is do you just accept an accusation with no proof? If I don’t like someone I work with, and I make up a story about them stealing from the supply closet, should they just take my word for it and fire them?
We settled this a long time ago with the innocent until proven guilty thing. Sometimes it sucks, but it’s part of our society.
No, we settled a long time ago that you are guilty until proven innocent before sending someone to jail. Because that really does strip you of a fundamental right.
Firing someone, and other civil matters, take a far lower standard of proof. And that’s a good thing. If you wanted to fire a worker suspected of a crime, it would take years to establish a guilty verdict. In that time, they could easily further undermine your company.
And what about a coworker reported for being disrespectful to customers, which is not a crime and will never go to trial? Do you fire him immediately, while his colleague keeps his job while awaiting trial for minor theft?
When you agree to work for a company, you agree to their policies. And that might include summary termination for certain offenses. It’s right there in the handbook. If you don’t like it, you are free to go elsewhere. Colleges have handbooks too, but suddenly we want to make exceptions when it comes to sexual assault.
Being fired for suspected theft could be devastating for your future employment prospects. Much like being expelled for accusation of sexual assault could affect the rest of your life. In the employment case, the company has just opened themselves up for a wrongful termination suit. And correctly so, if they have no proof.
No, but this still constitutes a violation of the principles upon which our justice system is built, even if it is technically outside the justice system.
The fact that you don’t have a right to go to that college does not make the disregard of a student’s rights any less abhorrent.
What if a student was expelled for his sexuality? Or for having premarital sex?
The reason why I oppose punishing people for crimes that they haven’t committed, is because doing so is wrong.
If that worker was just fired with no proof at all? Then, yeah, that’d be a problem. Because imagine that I did it because that guy was gay? Or because he was a muslim. Maybe he didn’t do anything at all wrong, but I merely lied about it to get rid of him.
While perhaps not technically illegal, it’s still wrong. At least according to my personal ethical and moral code.
Yes if you have evidence, like you’re his manager and saw him do it. You don’t do it based on hearsay. This is a ridiculous argument, because you assume no one will ever make an accusation that isn’t true.
Preponderance of evidence is long established as sufficient grounds for non-criminal sanctions.
While I agree that it’s better that 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man is imprisoned, I’m not fine with 10 men skating for ignoring consent to avoid one falsely accused having to switch colleges. It’s as simple as that. You’d have to convince me that a substantial proportion of accusations are false and that the preponderance of evidence standard was insufficient to weed out the false accusations in a significant proportion of cases before I’d reject it as the standard for suspensions or expulsions in sexual assault cases.
Remember, the purpose of the project isn’t to catch rapists. The purpose is to discourage undesired inter-student behavior before it happens. It’s very much the same as the school having an honor code.
I agree with antlers and note that while i agree with the standard of evidence normally used, in the case of rape by non-consent but not involving violence it would be essentially impossible to ever convict any man in any situation of date rape, because there usually never be other witnesses and it amounts to a he-said, she-said dispute.
Some vague realization of this is no doubt why so many cultures hundreds of years ago insisted on evidence of a woman “resisting” rape to have the incident be considered rape. Hopefully though we’re more sophisticated than that now.
Should the fact that we are, for the most part, talking about state institutions and not private companies, mean that the schools should uphold the basic standards of justice held by the states that control them?
I would imagine that a state office of whatever is held to a higher standard of firing than a private company. Perhaps not in every state but in many.
The state has multiple standards.
When it tries to put someone in jail, it needs to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
But if you are sued by the state, it only needs to prevail with a preponderance of evidence just like everyone else (notoriously, this include civil forfeiture).
And for some state officials, the mere appearance of impropriety is enough to trigger sanctions even without actual evidence of wrongdoing. For instance, some officials are required to be free of conflicts of interest, even if there is no evidence that their competing interests are actually influencing their decisions.
I don’t think that’s necessarily a consideration. Public or private, these are educational institutions, and their disciplinary policies are determined by their educational mission. I don’t think the fact that it is a state institution would prevent a university from having an honor board, for example.
State institutions might be more vulnerable to charges that a particular disciplinary policy violated equal protection under the law. This might require the school to demonstrate that if their policy had markedly different disciplinary outcomes for male and female students, the differing impacts were intended to balance the differing harm suffered by the male and female students from unwanted sexual contact. I think this is a real, but not insurmountable, hurdle. Similar equal-protection arguments might arise if a policy had disparate racial impact, but I think schools could address them in the same way they address equal-protection issues arising from other disciplinary policies (for example, the enforcement of a curfew for an athletic team might have disparate racial impact, but universities have been able to justify them against equal-protection challenges).
Antlers made a better general response than I can, so I will focus on just a few points.
Homosexuals are usually a protected class. Sexual predators are not.
You can certainly be expelled for having premarital sex at several evangelical colleges. If you want to have premarital sex, then don’t apply to those schools.
But we aren’t talking about a system where students are chosen by lottery to be expelled for sexual assault. An eyewitness complaint is a form of evidence.
Protected classes, again.
Sure, but you can lie in court too. You would face the risk of a perjury charge.
In college you aren’t under oath, but liars can still be sued for defamation.
Funny you should mention that.
In the 2013–14 academic year, 4.2 percent of Colgate’s students were black. According to the university’s records, in that year black male students were accused of 50 percent of the sexual violations reported to the university, and they made up 40 percent of the students formally adjudicated.
As best we can tell, Colgate isn’t an outlier. Yoffe notes that male students of color are “vastly overrepresented in the cases I’ve tracked.” Harvard University Law Professors Janet Halley and Jeannie Suk, who pay attention to Title IX cases and have written about the lack of due process for accused students, share this impression. I do as well.
Ruling just decided.
And accused sexual predators? The Constitution makes them protected until due process is fulfilled. I have a daughter and I’m concerned about the incidence of sexual assault on campuses along with the historical lack of effort to prevent and punish them.
A no-investigation, zero tolerance policy isn’t the answer and is going to cost the public a lot of money in settlements. It’s also going to destroy the lives of those falsely accused.
This is a pretty narrow decision-- it says that the conduct board erred when it set aside its own procedures that allow the accused to question the accuser.
The larger point they made, I think, is that in cases where credibility of the competing stories is the crux of the case, the disciplinary board must have a way to weigh both sides. They failed to do that in this case.
You must be reading a different decision than I am. Or just reading the very last couple of paragraphs, which is part of their second reason for upholding the lower court.
I mean they mention that, after going on for like 6 pages about how their procedures weren’t good enough in the first place and didn’t constitute Due Process, during which they said :“State universities must afford students minimum due process protections before issuing significant disciplinary decisions.”
That statement isn’t very narrow. It applies to all these cases.
At the same time, while the public has a competing interest in the enforcement of Title IX, that interest can never override individual constitutional rights.
Due process means that you follow your own institutional procedures. Which is reasonable. It’s what all parties had agreed to after all.
It does not mean that the accused has the same rights that they would in court. There is certainly nothing to support the “innocent until proven guilty” approach that you prefer.
The decision spells this out:
We do not require schools to “transform [their] classrooms into courtrooms” to provide constitutionally adequate due process.
we have recognized that a constitutionally permissible disciplinary system need not follow the rules of evidence.
a university student has “no right to [the] use of formal rules of evidence” at his disciplinary hearing.
we emphasize that UC’s obligations here are narrow: it must provide a means for the ARC panel to evaluate an alleged victim’s credibility, not for the accused to physically confront his accuser.
This establishes a floor for what courts will consider a reasonable hearing: the accuser must be willing to answer questions posed by the administrators. That’s all.
What magnet said.
Also, anecdote is not data, and there may be stuff not mentioned there, but if you read the facts of the case as stated in the opinion, it certainly wouldn’t have been a gross miscarriage of justice if this guy had gotten his one year suspension-- even if you believe the accused sincerely thought the sex was consensual. You’d. have to believe not only that the woman decided to falsely accuse the guy, but that she was able to make the story convincing enough that five of her friends were willing to back her. I’m not surprised the conduct board came to the decision they did, or that they were willing to defend the decision in court.