Higher education now administers the law. Judge Roy Bean would be proud.
In April 2011, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued a letter ordering colleges and universities to be more aggressive in prosecuting accusations of sexual assault. The letter began with the Orwellian salutation “Dear Colleague” but was a legally binding regulatory document lowering the burden of evidence in prosecution of accusations. These new lowered standards are effective 60 days after the letter’s date – and set the new standards without recourse to public hearings, comment periods or any due diligence mechanism.
Officials from OCR frequently assert that one in five students on college campuses will become the victim of sexual assault. If these numbers are correct (let’s just pretend for a minute) then college campuses incur an incidence of rape 606 times higher than the most dangerous cities in America.
According to FBI statistics, for example, Detroit recorded an average of 33 rapes per 100,000 people. 1 in 5 in a population of 100,000 would be 20,000 rapes.
The letter, which lowers evidentiary requirements to the “preponderance of the evidence” standard, was enacted during an inquiry into a sexual misconduct case at Stanford University, mid-procedure, reducing the burden of evidence necessary to declare guilt . The accused male student was found guilty of sexual misconduct for having sex with a female student while they were both intoxicated.
Samantha Harris[1] wrote for the New York Times “At the time the student was charged, Stanford was using the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard — the highest standard of proof, used by courts in criminal cases. But after OCR’s letter, Stanford shifted to the “preponderance” standard in the middle of his case.”
Stanford’s guidelines determining sexual misconduct state : “intoxicated” students cannot consent to sexual contact. This is alarming enough, but even forgetting about adults in the real world who commonly participate in sex after drinking, in this case both participants where intoxicated. How does culpability attach to one, a and loss of volition attach to the other?
The accused man at Stanford, whose case had been dropped by the prosecutor and police in Palo Alto, Calif., was convicted by the student-run court. Convicted of sexual assault, by a student-run court.
Stanford’s definition of consent to sex imposes a concept that is foreign to most people’s idea of adult consent and is inconsistent with California state law. The training material for their “Dean’s Alternative Review Process,” which handles sexual harassment and misconduct cases, informs student jurors that they should be “very, very cautious in accepting a man’s claim that he has been wrongly accused of abuse or violence,” claiming:
“[T]he great majority of allegations of abuse—though not all—are substantially accurate” .
To recognize the significance of this guideline, please consider the following:
On June 2010, the Orlando Police stated : “[F]alse reporting has reached an epidemic level.”[2] and asked the public to make fewer false rape claims.
In 2001, Dr Eugene J. Kanin, Ph.D. Of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, at Purdue University that in his research: “conducted with the cooperation of the police agency of a small metropolitan community, 45 consecutive, disposed, false rape allegations covering a 9 year period were studied. False rape allegations constitute 41% of the total forcible rape cases reported.”
Kanin also stated in the same report, “False rape allegations are reported in similar numbers at college campuses; approximately 50% of rape charges are admitted to be false by the accuser.”
Kanin’s findings are qualified by the documented admission by the accusers that their rape accusations were false – this means that the 41% to 50% estimates of Kanin’s report represent a baseline guarantee of false accusation, allowing the possibility that actual false accusation numbers are significantly higher.
Returning to Stanford’s “Dean’s Alternative Review Process” – by which students are trained to convict individuals accused of sexual assault:
“[T]he great majority of allegations of abuse—though not all—are substantially accurate”
The book this training material is drawn from is titled, Why Does He Do That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. The title itself reveals a formal logical fallacy commonly called the Unstated Major Premise. That is an argument in which a major assumption, premise, or reason that justifies the conclusion, is absent from the wording of the argument. A training manual for students playing at being prosecutors, which leads them directly to the assumption of guilt is an incredibly dangerous example of ideological trickery and malfeasance. The manual also instructs these student “advocates” that an accused “acting persuasive and logical” is further indication of guilt.
On August 30, Robert Smith published an article on Real Clear Politics[4] in which he stated “If the matter at hand is a minor traffic accident, a breakdown of due process might be unfortunate, but it would not be life-shattering for the party found to be at fault. In matters as serious as rape or sexual harassment, however, due process, if anything, is more critical, not less.
In May of 2011, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) contacted the Dept of Ed’s Office of Civil Rights noting that its members were “troubled by [OCR’s] failure to explicitly instruct administrators that public universities may not violate the First Amendment rights of students and that private universities must honor their promises of freedom of expression to students.
The Stanford case is far from unique. In fact, a casual skimming of news aggregate sites produces several cases of this type every day. The pattern is simple and predictable. Boy and Girl get together and kiss, or have sex – girl later regrets her choice because she’s been caught cheating, or she’s embarrassed about being a “slut” or she is angry the interlude did not result in a relationship commitment – so she retroactively reframes her own consensual sexual contact as an assault.
Once the accusation is made, the administrative machine does what it is now structured to do, grinding up the male, ignoring Habeas Corpus, ignoring due process, ignoring standards of evidence, ignoring everything except the convenience of the automatically presumed-to-be-credible female “victim.” The Boy is expelled and barred from re-entry to another school, and the school often keeps his tuition money.
Caleb Warner, a former student at University of North Dakota provides another example of this machine in action[5]. Mr Warner was falsely accused of sexual assault by a female student with whom he’d had consensual sexual contact. The school decided Mr Warner had violated their code of student conduct and barred him from the university for three years. They did this based on no evidence, solely on accusation by the female student who is now a fugitive on the run from police – for issuing the false accusation against Mr. Warner. In light of Mr. Warner’s innocence – and the outstanding arrest warrant against his accuser the school has nonetheless refused to lift his ban from academic life.
The abandonment of due process is likely not the goal of the OCR’s edict to eviscerate constitutional rights– it’s just a tactic. That universities retain the paid tuition fees of male students, once disposed of, may help map the motivation behind the “Dear Colleague,” letter. At Stanford, students pay $57,000 per year to attend.
While the theft of tuition is definitionally fraud, the real money comes in redefining sexual assault along greatly broadened terms – and these wider definitions reflected in collected statistics by law enforcement agencies.
That the sexual grievance industry depends on increased carnage for profit leads to understanding the new revenue model is not just for schools. Well run enterprises will test-market a new business model before deploying it on a larger scale. By greatly expanding the scope of the legal definition of sexual assault, encompassing a great percentage of wholly consensual sexual interactions – the “legitimate” statistics will change, reflecting increased incidence of sexual assault closer to what feminism’s marketing has long pretended.
Proponents of domestic policy based on data rather than fantasy have been critical of the influence of feminist dogma, citing law enforcement statistics which contradict the narrative of a rape epidemic. Stats, such as those displayed on the bureau of justice statistics website are used to set budgets and justify funding in the domestic violence grievance industry. Universities which increasingly operate extra-judicial courts on ideological rather than legal guidelines serve as both a “test market” as well as a forum where students are exposed to ideological governance , relatively insulated from more mature members of public who would sharply reject the abandonment of due process. Students emerging from this test environment as graduates, or otherwise, do so carrying the normalization of extra-judicial ideological courts into the social mainstream.
And the timing of this may not be coincidental. Very shortly, the FBI will be discussing the revision and expansion of the definition of rape. A subcommittee of the Criminal Justice Information Service of the FBI plans to take up the task at an Oct. 18 meeting in Baltimore. The expanded definition under consideration includes cases in which the victims are under the influence of alcohol. Recommendations of this committee will go to an advisory board and then to FBI Director Robert Mueller for approval[6].
These proposed changes are the result of organizations including the Feminist Majority Foundation and the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia[7] who have been petitioning to expand the definition used by the FBI in their uniform statistics on criminal victimization.
This might appear a terribly cynical interpretation of events. So cynical that readers may assume I’ve got my facts wrong. Or that I have omitted a major element with which it makes sense for universities to use their own kangaroo courts to appropriate tuition and eject students, barring them from education after defrauding them; doing all this with the complete sanction of the Department of Education.
What we have are universities – which are just businesses, but they’ve been given sanction to convene courts operating without public accountability, without due process, and hidden from the public in the sandbox of the academic world. These courts – lacking accountability to law – are now being used to defraud male students, derail their lives and demoralize them to an extent that the carnage remains hidden.
[box type=”download” icon=”none”]The businesses we call “schools” now operate extra-judicial courts and determine guilt using ideology rather than the law, and the government ratifies this. What argument, then, can be made to stop any other business from also convening their own courts using their own ideology in place of laws? Any organization could charge citizens (perhaps employees?) with various offenses, and then determine guilt and penalty. [/box]
Also, because the extra-judicial courts of ideology operate with the force of law and the sanction and funding of government – but conveniently without the checks and balances of legal due process, political efforts to”reform” them are a cul-de-sac designed to frustrate any such efforts.
Universities now operate at once outside the law and with its backing. This is definitionally vigilante “justice,” made worse by the sanction of government. In a political climate where government actively funds and propels private, illegal courts – and when citizens are defrauded and professionally destroyed by illegal courts run by businesses – how soon before university administrators and functionaries fear being lynched from tree limbs?
There are several obvious reasons why a volatile, commensurate reaction to the emergence of this system has not occurred. Foremost is the fact that the sandbox of the academic world insulates them from the public scrutiny that law enforcement and legislative proceedings must endure. This means that almost nobody is aware that the rule of law is gone in America.
[1] http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/the_feds_mad_assault_on_campus_sex_zjUl29Y8d3NmoYOkKchblO
[2] http://www.wesh.com/news/23991233/detail.html
[3] http://www.anandaanswers.com/pages/naaFalse.html
[4] http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/08/30/on_sexual_harassment_and_title_ix_111065.html
[5] http://www.wdaz.com/event/article/id/6963/
[6] http://www.dc50tv.com/news/nationworld/la-na-rape-fbi-20111001,0,3391718.story
[7] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/30/fbi-rape-definition_n_855872.html
