The ACLU’s J’Accuse

The Weekly Standard

The group comes out against equal treatment before the law. More than four years ago, 28 members of the Harvard Law School faculty publicly criticized the sexual-assault adjudication procedures adopted by the university under pressure from the Obama administration. They noted that these were “overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” The law professors, including some with stellar feminist credentials, said that the university’s goal should “be to fully address sexual harassment while at the same time protecting students against unfair and inappropriate discipline, honoring individual relationship autonomy, and maintaining the values of academic freedom.” Similar expressions of concern about the basic […]

The Yale Rape Trial Isn’t Over Yet

The Weekly Standard

The March 7 acquittal by a New Haven jury of a suspended Yale student on charges of raping a classmate has been much lamented on campus and in the national media. But a review of the evidence shows that the trial was fair, the defense was ethical, and there was much more than a reasonable doubt about the accuser’s claim that she was so drunk as to lack the capacity to consent. The facts of this he-said, she-said case are that Saifullah Khan, a then-22-year-old Yale senior, and his accuser, also a senior, had Halloween dinner together at the dorm’s […]

The Trump administration should force colleges to disclose data on race in admissions: Let’s see how preferences work

NY Daily News

As the Trump administration prepares to investigate a highly plausible but previously neglected 2015 complaint to federal agencies by 64 Asian-American groups that Harvard uses illegal racial admissions quotas to limit Asian-Americans, all sides in the racial-preference controversy wonder whether officials may have bigger things in mind. Although I am very far from being a Trump fan, I hope they do. I especially hope that the administration will force universities that consider race in admissions to disclose for the first time the so-far-closely-guarded data that would expose the nature and size of their preferences and the academic impact on supposed […]

Until Proven Guilty: The vanishing of due process in campus rape tribunals

National Review

When it comes to due process on campus, Republicans in Congress, who campaigned on vows to rein in the Obama administration’s abuses of executive power, have largely acquiesced in its bureaucratic imposition of quasi-judicial tyranny. For more than four years, the White House and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have used an implausible reinterpretation of a 1972 civil-rights law to impose mandates unimagined by the law’s sponsors. It has forced almost all of the nation’s universities and colleges to disregard due process in disciplinary proceedings when they involve allegations of sexual assault. Enforced by officials far outside […]

A Little-Understood Engine of Campus Unrest: Racial Admissions Preferences

American Spectator

Why are some of the most privileged students in the nation plunging into a racial grievance culture and upending their campuses as though oppressed by Halloween costumes they don’t approve, imagined racial slights, portraits of Woodrow Wilson, a tiny handful of real racial epithets, and the like? The reasons are of course multifaceted. But one deserves far more attention than it has gotten: Many or most of the African-American student protesters really are victims — but not of old-fashioned racism.

A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of ‘The Hunting Ground’

National Review

A so-called documentary about campus rape, The Hunting Ground, is set to air Thursday on CNN, which co-produced it. But a newly available e-mail from an investigative producer of the film spectacularly belies its pretensions to be honest, balanced journalism. Instead, the e-mail adds to the large body of evidence that that the film is highly misleading if not dishonest.

More College Rape Hype — This Time from the Washington Post

The Weekly Standard

Since 2012, the New York Times has led the way in systematically biased coverage of on-campus sexual assault allegations and how colleges are responding. The paper has relentlessly hyped the issue, has smeared quite possibly innocent students while omitting evidence that they were innocent, and has cheered efforts to presume guilt and deny due process for the accused. It has also parroted egregiously misleading statistical claims used by the Obama administration and others to portray the campus rape problem, which is clearly serious, as an out-of-control “epidemic,” which it clearly is not. (In fact, the campus rate rape has plunged […]

Opening Argument – Is There a Middle Ground on Race?

National Journal

The June 28 Supreme Court decision sharply curbing the ability of school districts to pursue racial integration illustrates the pitfalls of both the conservative and the liberal blocs’ approaches to the problem of race. But finding a principled middle ground is not easy.

The conservatives. Chief Justice John Roberts’s plurality opinion for the four-man conservative bloc oversimplified the Court’s precedents in order to veer close to a "colorblind Constitution" absolutism that has never been the law. Roberts declared broadly that the integration programs before the Court — in Seattle and metropolitan Louisville, Ky. — "are directed only to racial balance, pure and simple, an objective this Court has repeatedly condemned as illegitimate." But no Supreme Court majority has ever condemned the pursuit of racial balance in public schools as illegitimate.

To the contrary, countless judicial decrees mandated race-based student assignments as a remedy for official segregation during the decades after Brown v. Board of Education. More to the point here, the justices said repeatedly during that era that communities with no such history of official segregation could pursue integration if they chose. Many lower courts said the same. This reflected a widespread view that racial isolation of minority students — especially poor blacks — hurts their educations and that proximity to children of other races can benefit all students by fostering interracial understanding and empathy.

Roberts unpersuasively brushed aside this body of precedent as though it had been silently overruled by the general language of more-recent decisions in the very different context of racial preferences in awarding government contracts and seats in selective universities.

Opening Argument – How Courts and Congress Wrecked School Discipline

National Journal

Outside Anacostia Senior High School, three miles southeast of the Capitol, a football player was killed on October 30 by a stray bullet meant for someone else. Not far away, at Ballou Senior High, a gang fight involving 15 or 20 students broke out in the cafeteria on November 10. School officials "have no control," one Ballou mother complained to The Washington Post.

Legal Affairs – Nothing in the Constitution Bars Helping Inner-City Kids

National Journal

Eulanda Johnson sees her daughter’s move from Cleveland’s dismal public school system to St. Mary’s Elementary as a kind of deliverance. At public school, she says, 9-year-old Ebony learned little amid the disruptive kids, and administrators "only want your kid in that seat to get the money" from the state. At St. Mary’s, "I felt welcome when I walked in the door, and when I walk through a door and feel the warmth and the care, I know that that’s the school for my child." Before long, with the help of a state voucher program that pays most of her tuition, Ebony "wanted to start learning."