KC Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is the author, along with Stuart Taylor, of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America's Universities.
Last week, a New Haven jury acquitted Yale student Saifullah Khan of rape. Coverage of the case provided only the latest reminder of the one-sided, often effectively misleading manner in which the mainstream media covers the issue of campus sexual assault. Because criminal charges were filed against Khan, he was entitled to constitutional protections (the […]
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During her nearly four years running Barack Obama’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), Catherine Lhamon was nothing if not consistent. She sought to use the power of her office—chiefly by threatening to withhold federal funds—to force colleges and universities to change their campus sexual assault policies. Every substantive change demanded by the Obama administration made […]
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While Yale is the only institution required by the Federal government to outline its campus sexual assault adjudications, (albeit in an increasingly limited way), a second university — Stanford — has now started to do so. As with Yale, these reports unintentionally reveal the moral panic over sexual assault on many of the nation’s leading campuses. […]
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Nearly 60 Democratic legislators tweeted criticism of Education Secretary Betsy Devos’ speech, which advocated a fairer approach and more respect for due process in campus Title IX tribunals. The preferred adjectives included “terrible,” “despicable,” “insulting, “perverse,” “appalling,” “disgraceful,” “shameful,” and “dangerous. No congressional Democrat, in any way, praised her remarks, which insisted on the rights […]
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In the debate over campus due process, it would be difficult to overstate the significance of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ George Mason speech. No comparable address occurred during the Obama years—former Education Secretary Arne Duncan largely deferred on the issue to Russlynn Ali and Catherine Lhamon, who ran the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) during […]
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In a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights, Yale became the nation’s only university required to document all sexual assault allegations on campus. The reports, prepared by Yale Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler, are generally bare-bones (and became even more so last year, after Spangler announced she’d decided to supply less information about […]
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While Education Secretary Betsy DeVos considers reforming the Title IX policies she inherited from her predecessor, states have acted on their own. On the one side, some blue states moved beyond Obama’s guilt-presuming approach. Four states (California, New York, Illinois, and Connecticut) have adopted “affirmative consent” laws that define sexual assault differently for college students […]
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Rolling Stone magazine recently settled a defamation lawsuit over their falsely reported article about a gang rape at UVA’s Phi Kappa Psi fraternity. The $1.65 million settlement seems like a win/win for the two parties. It’s hardly surprising that Rolling Stone settled. If the magazine couldn’t prevail against Dean Nicole Eramo, it certainly faced a […]
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Too often on campus, the best chance for a wrongfully accused student to achieve justice involves a lawsuit after the campus tribunal has done its worst. A system that uses the lowest standard of proof, allows accusers to appeal not-guilty findings, lacks mechanisms for mandatory discovery of exculpatory evidence, denies meaningful (or any) representation by […]
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Middlebury’s response to the disruption of Charles Murray’s invited campus address—followed by the protesters assaulting and injuring Professor Alison Stanger, moderator for the talk—offered little ground for optimism. A statement from the college implied that evidence (albeit ambiguous evidence) existed suggesting that some professors violated the Faculty Handbook in the pre-disruption period. The disruptors themselves […]
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The lawsuit filed by Northwestern Title IX accuser “Nola Hartley” against best-selling author Laura Kipnis (Unwanted Advances) has attracted substantial attention from both the mainstream media and from commentators; the two best pieces (taking differing approaches to the lawsuit’s merits) come from Robby Soave and Michelle Goldberg. The Kipnis book looks primarily at four cases—one […]
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Notre Dame stands to lose a Title IX case in an unusual flurry of kangaroo court blunders. It “investigated” the case and came away only with the female’s hostile emails, none of her loving ones (knowing that many emails were missing). When the male contemplated suicide, Notre Dame interpreted those thoughts as “dating violence,” and […]
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As Middlebury initiated what appears to be token punishments (single-term probation) for the students who disrupted the Charles Murray talk, the college’s student government (which has yet to condemn the disruptors in any way) passed a resolution demanding that Middlebury cease all punishment of students under the current college disciplinary code, lest they “contribute to […]
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Imagine if the CUNY administration had issued a general message to all CUNY faculty last year, asking them to “teach resistance” in one of their classes, to focus a “discussion of the [Obama] administration policies relevant to their subject.” Such a move would have been seen as a clear transgression of academic freedom and would have […]
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As it left office last year, Barack Obama’s administration made one final move in its crusade against campus due process: it requested a massive increase—$30.7 million, or 28.7 percent—in funding for the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). The previous year, at a time when discretionary federal spending was barely rising, the office had received a […]
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Over the last few years, we have become all but immune to what, under any other circumstances, would be a fantastic claim—that one in five female undergraduates will be victims of sexual assault. This rate would translate to several hundreds of thousands of violent crime victims (with almost all of the incidents unnoticed) annually, and, […]
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Last week featured a rarity—the filing of criminal charges against a campus sexual assault accuser. Ashe Schow has a full write-up of the case, which originated when a Sacred Heart University student named Nikki Yovino accused two of the university’s football players of sexually assaulting her. An affidavit prepared by the local police indicated that the […]
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In a 2012 resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights, Yale became the nation’s only university required to document all sexual assault allegations on campus. The reports, prepared by Yale deputy provost Stephanie Spangler, are generally bare-bones (and became even more so last year after Spangler announced she’d decided to supply less information about […]
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A little more than a decade ago, I commented on the “re-visioning” of American history—the transformation of “traditional” sub-disciplines such as U.S. political, diplomatic, or military history to have them focus on the themes of race, class, and gender (and, now, ethnicity) that have come to dominate the field. A more recent development, documented by […]
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As the Obama administration draws to a close, opponents of campus due process have launched an aggressive public relations campaign on behalf of their agenda, lest change comes with a new regime in the White House. The highest-profile effort came from Joe Biden, who penned an open letter to the presidents of the nation’s colleges […]
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Though federal judges tend to uphold a lot of unjust campus decisions in sex-assault cases, Judge Elizabeth Dillon, an Obama appointee, proved on December 23 that some campus procedures are just too outrageous to survive judicial review. The judge’s due process ruling came in a case out of James Madison University. (You can read her […]
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We don’t normally think of college athletes as prominent defenders of due process. Yet perhaps the highest-profile protest against the post-Dear Colleague letter demise of campus due process came last week at the University of Minnesota. Its emergence, the reaction to it, and its quick collapse speaks volumes about the relationship between due process and […]
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I’ve worked at CUNY under four governors—George Pataki, Elliot Spitzer, David Paterson, and Andrew Cuomo. Pataki (and state Senate Republicans) didn’t allocate to the institution sufficient funding. But he was by far the best governor of the four for CUNY. Pataki appointed a superbly-qualified chairman of the Board of Trustees, Benno Schmidt. He named other […]
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Since 2011, the federal government has made successful and devastating efforts to undermine civil liberties on campuses. The surprise outcome of the presidential election raises at least the possibility that this illicit campaign, based on a vast extension of Title IX, will be reversed. Thousands of students accused of sexual misconduct but denied due process […]
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The Obama administration, acting through the Office of Civil Rights, has made a terrible mess out of sexual misconduct hearings on our campuses, but it did one good thing without thinking much about it: it targeted one university—Yale—for regular reports on how it dealt in sexual assault hearings. The reports, released by Deputy Provost Stephanie […]
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In the suit against Rolling Stone by University of Virginia dean Nicole Eramo over the magazine’s false rape story, the trial rolls along, with the two sides offering a narrow band of arguments: according to Rolling Stone and former reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely, our nation’s campuses are teeming with sexual assaults, beset by a “rape […]
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In a first for the Obama-era Office for Civil Rights, the Education Department’s OCR found in favor of an accused student who filed a Title IX complaint against Wesley College. At the least, after five years, we’ve finally found a case whose facts were so outrageous that even an OCR notoriously indifferent to due process […]
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In campus sexual assault hearings, due process for accused students is rare, because of pressure from feminists and campus activists, administrators’ diffidence, and the Obama administration’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that minimized protections for the accused. Getting these cases into court for a due process trial is even rarer, but now the first such trial […]
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A lawsuit stemming from the most famous of the modern rape hoaxes—the Rolling Stone account of a brutal but fictional attack on “Jackie” at a University of Virginia fraternity—gained ground last week. A federal judge in Virginia ruled that UVA administrator Nicole Eramo’s lawsuit against Rolling Stone should go to trial. The lawsuit has been […]
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One of the year’s most important essays on higher education appeared earlier this week in The New York Times op-ed page. Historians Fredrick Logevall and Kenneth Osgood wrote of the decline of U.S. political history. “The public’s love for political stories,” they correctly noted, “belies a crisis in the profession. American political history as a field of […]
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