DeVos Keeps Her Promise on Campus Due Process

Wall Street Journal

Proposed new Title IX regulations aren’t perfect, but they vastly improve on Obama-era guidance. Betsy DeVos kept her promise. As the education secretary vowed in September 2017, the department’s Office for Civil Rights last week formally proposed new regulations designed to create a more just process when campus tribunals adjudicate sexual-misconduct allegations. The proposed rules closely track recent court rulings favoring accused students. In 2017 interim guidance, Mrs. DeVos had invited schools to develop fairer procedures under the law known as Title IX. But nearly all retained the Obama administration’s approach, which was heavily tilted against accused students. (The University […]

DeVos Pledges to Restore Due Process

Wall Street Journal

The Obama Education Department’s Title IX decree ‘failed too many students,’ she says. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made clear her intention to correct one of the Obama administration’s worst excesses—its unjust rules governing sexual misconduct on college campuses. In a forceful speech Thursday at Virginia’s George Mason University, Mrs. DeVos said that “one rape is one too many”—but also that “one person denied due process is one too many.” Mrs. DeVos declared that “every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined.” This might seem like an obvious affirmation of fundamental American principles. But such sentiments were […]

How to End a Campus Injustice With the Stroke of a Pen

Wall Street Journal

The Obama-era Title IX sex-crime regime should give way to real regulations that respect due process. With his legislative agenda in trouble, President Trump could do a lot of good by using his executive power to reverse an egregious example of the Obama administration’s bureaucratic tyranny. I refer to the 2011 command by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and subsequent orders, forcing thousands of schools to take an aggressive role in the investigation and punishment of alleged sex crimes on college campuses. Under threat of losing federal funds, almost all schools have willingly complied with a procedural regime […]

The Hollywood Hit-Job on Justice Clarence Thomas

Wall Street Journal

I covered the confirmation hearings in 1991. HBO’s movie heavily edits history to favor Anita Hill. The current battle over President Obama’s Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland is child’s play compared with the lurid brawl over George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas 25 years ago. On Saturday, HBO marked the quarter-century anniversary with “Confirmation,” a retelling of how Judge Thomas, a conservative, up-from-poverty black jurist from Pinpoint, Ga., saw his nomination nearly derailed by allegations of sexual harassment made by Anita Hill, a black attorney who had worked for him 10 years earlier. Ms. Hill’s calm, graphic testimony during the three-day hearing on her charges […]

Book Review: ‘The Rule of Nobody’ by Philip K. Howard

The Wall Street Journal

Amid the liberal-conservative ideological clash that paralyzes our government, it’s always refreshing to encounter the views of Philip K. Howard, whose ideology is common sense spiked with a sense of urgency. In “The Rule of Nobody,” Mr. Howard shows how federal, state and local laws and regulations have programmed officials of both parties to follow rules so detailed, rigid and, often, obsolete as to leave little room for human judgment. He argues passionately that we will never solve our social problems until we abandon what he calls a misguided legal philosophy of seeking to put government on regulatory… Continue reading […]

Book Review: ‘For Discrimination’ by Randall Kennedy

The Wall Street Journal

The case for racial preferences in higher education has long been made using sophistry designed to hide the heavy social and moral costs of affirmative action. In “For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law,” Randall Kennedy makes that case with rare intellectual honesty and fair-mindedness. And while it won’t persuade opponents of the policy, the book has the salutary effect of clarifying the terms of the debate. The author, a professor at Harvard Law School, begins building his case for racially… Continue reading the column here.

Johnson and Taylor: Penn State, Duke and Integrity

The Wall Street Journal

In recent years, two prominent American universities have experienced catastrophic leadership failures that exposed young people in their charge to horrible abuse. The failures grew out of a lack of courage to resist the demands of powerful special interests. As Penn State tries to reform its campus culture, what can it teach Duke?

You probably know about Penn State, where top administrators, according to a recent report by former FBI head Louis Freeh, concealed critical facts about years of child molestation committed by assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, all in an effort to protect the image of its football program. After the scandal became public, trustees fired the university’s president and its longtime football coach; two senior administrators left their jobs. The trustees then commissioned a multimillion-dollar investigation headed by Mr. Freeh, and they have promised to implement most of his 119 recommended reforms.

You may not have known, or remember, the leadership scandal at Duke, which became manifest in 2006 but led to no punishment or even censure of any kind for any of the professors and administrators who behaved disgracefully, including President Richard Brodhead.

We refer to the rapidly disproven allegation of a savage gang rape hurled at three Duke lacrosse players, with dozens more accused of complicity, by an African-American stripper whom they had hired to perform at a team party. Scores of professors formed themselves into what can most kindly be called a rush-to-judgment mob, adding their denunciations of the falsely accused lacrosse players (three were indicted) to the damage already done by a rogue district attorney, Mike Nifong.