The College Fix

Coastal Carolina University adapts higher standard for accused students 

Students accused of sexual assault will have greater protections soon at Coastal Carolina University.

The public South Carolina university in Conway will move to the “clear and convincing” standard of evidence for Title IX and other conduct violations – this is a higher level of proof than “preponderance of evidence,” which is the norm.

The change will become official on January 1, 2025 according to a trustee who spoke to The College Fix via a phone interview. The actual policy is not going to be publicly available until then, the university’s Title IX office told The Fix via email.

Trustee George Mullen said the normal student conduct case uses the preponderance of evidence as the standard to prove guilt. This standard is met when the evidence is more likely to be true than not true, Mullen, a practicing attorney, told The Fix. Clear and convincing is a higher standard—between preponderance and beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Biden administration’s changes to Title IX only allowed for preponderance of evidence if “all similar” university actions follow the higher evidentiary level, Mullen said.

Mullen noted that these changes do not affect Title XII, which relates to employment.

He said Title IX cases are often a “he-said-she-said” situation and that since people’s rights are at stake, a higher standard of evidence “protects everyone.”

Universities, under pressure from the Obama administration and activists, have applied a lower standard of evidence for sexual assault cases, which often involve accused males. The legal theory is that Title IX’s prohibition against sex discrimination means universities can be guilty if they do not adequately protect women from sexual assault.

In many cases, students have few rights when it comes to defending themselves against the charges of sexual assault, which can have long lasting and costly consequences, as reported by The Fix.

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The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which advocates for due process rights on college campuses, provided further insights on the benefits of the new standard.

The adoption of this new evidence standard is a “significant, positive change,” Senior Program Officer for Policy Reform Ryan Ansloan told The Fix via email.

“College campuses too often fail to provide students with basic due process protections, like the right to be presumed [innocent], access to evidence, or the opportunity to question witnesses, and then determine guilt or innocence based on the ‘preponderance of the evidence,’” Ansloan said.

Ansloan said while the preponderance of the evidence standard may make sense in civil cases, it does not make sense when the “conduct at issue is so serious.”

FIRE’s 2022 Spotlight on Due Process found that out of the 53 surveyed universities, not one used the clear and convincing standard in all of its disciplinary procedures. “Several schools used it in at least one of their procedures (e.g. Cornell used it in their non-academic, non-sexual misconduct procedures, but not in their Title IX procedures).”

The American Association of University Women did not respond to two emailed requests for comment in the past two weeks that asked for comment on the changes. Know Your IX, an advocacy group, initially expressed interest in commenting, but has yet to respond further in the past several weeks despite several email reminders.

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IMAGE: Coastal Carolina University/Facebook

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