Stuart Taylor, Jr.Posts – Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Guided by Faith, Divinity Student Fought His ‘Anti-Racist’ Princeton Seminary — and Won

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 13:33:49 +0000

Timothy Keiderling’s decision to enroll in the Princeton Theological Seminary reflected his commitment “to give my life to work for justice and to live out the values of the Kingdom of God.” In a letter to the seminary’s president, Craig Barnes, he wrote that he “would sacrifice anything to make sure that my brothers and sisters see relief from their oppression.”

But the seminary’s concept of justice clashed with Keiderling’s conscience when PTS required him to attend “anti-racism” training sessions that he considered a form of indoctrination. He refused to participate in the sessions even after being reminded that they were mandatory. And then – early this year, with the potent support of the newly founded Academic Freedom Alliance (AFA) – he convinced the seminary to exempt him from the training.

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Ending due process: Reinstating Catherine Lhamon at the Dept. of Education is a mistake

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Mon, 14 Jun 2021 05:00:48 +0000

Lhamon’s nomination is a threat to the new rules and culture of fairness. She will roll back due process protections in college sexual assault cases.

It is now so common in Washington to oppose even a president’s lower-level nominees that no one takes such opposition seriously anymore. It’s just more partisan background noise. The problem with crying “wolf,” of course, is that when the wolf finally comes, no one listens.

Now, however, the wolf is at the door. Her name is Catherine Lhamon, and she is being nominated to retake her old job – head of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). She played a major role during the Obama administration in ruining the educations and often the lives of countless students – almost all of them male – who were found guilty of sexual assault under flagrantly unfair, effectively guilt-presuming rules dictated by her office. Her commands also pressured universities to ignore or discount powerful evidence of innocence.

So this time around, Congress needs to heed the cry…

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College Alums Must Speak Up for Campus Free Speech

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 15:04:29 +0000

Free speech is very much in today’s headlines, especially with the outraged demands for technology companies to banish — or not — from their platforms speech they consider incitements to violence or hateful. But the greater danger may be the hostility within our colleges and universities to the free speech and academic freedom of faculty and students, and even alumni, who dissent from the views dominant on campuses today.

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Will Biden Heed Support Shown for Accused Students’ Rights?

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Sun, 13 Dec 2020 15:04:30 +0000

President-elect Biden and his team are preparing to bring what he has called a “quick end” to the new rules requiring fair, nondiscriminatory campus procedures for students accused of sexual assault that the Betsy DeVos Education Department issued in May.

But the results of a little-noticed but stunning poll suggest that on this issue, Biden is far out of step with the electorate, not to mention the courts and fundamental fairness. In one major survey, 68% of the 2,532 Americans polled in mid-November by YouGov agreed that “students accused of crimes on college campuses should receive the same civil liberties protections from their colleges that they receive in the court system.” Only 8% disagreed. The rest neither agreed nor disagreed.

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The ACLU’s ‘Death Star’ Client in Its Title IX Lawsuit

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 15:04:31 +0000

The American Civil Liberties Union has been deservedly criticized for its May 14 lawsuit indirectly attacking the civil liberties of students accused of sexual assault, who have since 2011 been subjected to grotesquely unfair campus proceedings that effectively presume their guilt.

It’s true, as the ACLU claims — after years of shameful silence during the Obama administration campaign to force (all too willing) universities to rig their processes against accused males – that its lawsuit against the Betsy DeVos Education Department does not directly attack all of the procedural-fairness reforms in its recently adopted Title IX rules.

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Biden’s Reade Denial Should Boost Title IX Rule Changes

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Sun, 03 May 2020 15:15:51 +0000

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party have suddenly come to realize that their previously professed, reflexive belief in sexual misconduct accusations was the wrong standard. Instead, with the sexual assault allegation against Biden by former staffer Tara Reade now roiling his campaign, the Democrats are saying that the accused as well as the accuser deserve to have their accounts heard and weighed impartially and with “due process,” to borrow from recent statements by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others.

If this long overdue change is sincere, the Democrats can show it by supporting the pending new Title IX regulations. The new rules are designed to require campuses to treat students accused of sexual misconduct with fairness and impartiality instead of effectively presuming guilt, as too many campuses currently do. Now is the ideal time for the Trump administration to release those regulations, spearheaded by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. The White House has been sitting on them for months, perhaps out of fear of being attacked as indifferent to survivors by Democrats, who have savaged DeVos for seeking fairness in campus sexual assault proceedings.

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Colleges Bristle as Judges, DeVos Push Protections for the Accused

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 15:15:31 +0000

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ proposed Title IX regulations, which are due to be issued in final form early next year, seek to require colleges that adjudicate claims of sexual assault against their students using some of the same procedures to ensure fairness that have long been treated as fundamental by courts. The most important provisions would require colleges to hold hearings at which a representative of each party has a right to cross-examine witnesses, including the other party, and to provide both students with all evidence gathered in the investigation.

But these proposals have generated furious opposition from pro-complainant activists and politicians willing to perpetuate the biases against accused students – procedures initiated by the Obama administration and with which most colleges were happy to comply. Alexandra Brodsky, a co-founder of Know Your IX, the nation’s most powerful pro-accusers’ rights organization, recently promised “massive national student resistance” to the effort to make campus procedures more even-handed. Josh Richards, a lawyer who regularly represents universities in lawsuits filed by accused students, dismissed cross-examination as being “without any meaningful addition in a truth-seeking function.” This view flies in the face of America’s founding principles, the Constitution, and longtime Supreme Court precedent. The high court has called the right to cross-examination “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” Yet Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking Democrat on the Senate HELP Committee, is leading the effort to neuter the regulations’ cross-examination provisions, according to the Washington Post.

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Sex Predator or #MeToo Prey?

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 15:39:10 +0000

Life was good for Matthew Dababneh until the fall 2017. A former congressional aide, the moderate Democrat had won an open seat in the California State Assembly in 2013 and easily won reelection twice. At age 36, he was rising in Democratic Party politics. Then, with breathtaking suddenness, his reputation and career were devastated. It started when a lobbyist named Pamela Lopez was quoted accusing an unnamed California lawmaker of pushing into a bathroom behind her, “expos[ing] himself and . . . masturbating.” She later claimed it was Dababneh. But he hopes his libel suit against her will provide the public hearing he has never had and prove his innocence.

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Manafort, Ukraine, and the Scapegoating of Greg Craig

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Wed, 27 Mar 2019 15:42:51 +0000

Of all the collateral damage inflicted on ancillary players in the special counsel’s probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, none is as strange – or capricious – as the Justice Department’s crusade against well-connected Democratic lawyer Gregory B. Craig. It seems on the verge of prosecuting Craig, one of Washington’s most celebrated lawyers, on charges of lying to department officials in 2013 to evade a legal duty to register as an agent for the Ukrainian government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). But the Justice Department’s leadership should take a hard look at the case before it’s too late to avert a grave injustice. (Disclosure: Greg Craig is a friend of mine.)

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Harvard, the NY Times and the #MeToo Takedown of an Academic Star

Stuart Taylor, Jr. — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 15:44:27 +0000

In a December 14, 2018 piece, the New York Times set the stage by noting that Roland G. Fryer Jr. had attained tenure at Harvard, received a MacArthur “genius” grant, and won the most prestigious award for a young American economist. Then came the takedown: “But his rapid ascent has taken a troubling turn as Harvard officials review a university investigator’s conclusion that Dr. Fryer fostered a work environment hostile to women, one filled with sexual talk and bullying.” This article, and Harvard’s sex bureaucracy, have made a near-pariah of the youngest black professor ever tenured at Harvard University, a man born into poverty who is still much admired among many former female and male subordinates and others who know him well – and who see the attacks on him as tinged with racism and “#MeToo” overreaction. The Times, among other sins against honest journalism, vastly overstated the criticism of Fryer in a confidential, 81-page report by ODR, which was itself grossly unfair to Fryer. The case against him boils down to telling a bunch of off-color jokes to subordinates.

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