The College Fix

Ladies, if you are raped – go to the police.

Administrators – if a student comes to you and tells you they were raped, it’s a criminal matter, meant for the police.

Why anyone thinks the federal government and campus officials – whose very livelihoods depend on the positive image of their school – are the way to go if they’re sexually assaulted is beyond me.

Nevertheless, Uncle Sam thinks he has the solution: the White House has rolled out its “Not Alone” program to purportedly help stop college rape and provide support to women. Who can argue with that, right?

But there’s danger lurking ahead. Here’s the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education on just that:

Troublingly, the Task Force’s recommended practices and the accompanying documents fail to answer FIRE’s grave and continuing concerns about campus civil liberties and the reliability, impartiality, and fundamental fairness of campus judicial proceedings for students accused of sexual harassment and assault. Among the documents released with the report are a template for “campus climate surveys,” a sexual misconduct policy checklist, and a sample confidentiality policy.

FIRE President Greg Lukianoff issued the following statement:

No one is happy with the way campuses currently deal with sexual harassment, sexual violence, and rape—not victims, not the accused, not parents or loved ones, not administrators, not university counsel, not defense attorneys, not civil liberties advocates, and not the general public.

The White House Task Force has attempted to correct the status quo’s failures. Unfortunately, it has missed an opportunity for meaningful and positive reform, instead doubling down on a broken system. By continuing to empower campus judiciaries to adjudicate allegations of serious criminal activity, the Task Force’s recommendations may ultimately worsen the situation for both victims and the accused. As the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), one of the nation’s preeminent anti-sexual assault organizations, stated in its written comment to the Task Force, “until we find a way to engage and partner with law enforcement, to bring these crimes out of the shadows of dorm rooms and administrators’ offices, and to treat them as the felonies that they are, we will not make the progress we hope.”

Perhaps most worryingly, the Task Force appears to be enthusiastic about essentially eliminating hearings altogether for students accused of assault and harassment. The Task Force is exploring a “single investigator” model, where a sole administrator would be empowered to serve as detective, judge, and jury, affording the accused no chance to challenge his or her accuser’s testimony. Tellingly, the Task Force expresses only the most meager sense of the rights necessary to secure fundamentally fair hearings, noting that it believes the single investigator model would still “safeguard an alleged perpetrator’s right to notice and to be heard.”

Keep in mind that in recent years, federal agencies have already ordered a breathtaking expansion of the definition of sexual harassment that cannot be squared with Supreme Court precedent. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has also mandated the use of our nation’s lowest standard of evidence in adjudicating campus allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Compounding these troubling developments, the Task Force recommends trainings that seem more likely to prejudice investigations than to deliver an impartial hearing.

Now, lest you think the government’s solution sounds just fine, I’ll direct you to this and this.

Jennifer Kabbany is associate editor of The College Fix. ( @JenniferKabbany )

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