Due Process
Is the federal government’s push for fairer handling of sexual-assault complaints eventually going to compel colleges to replace homegrown disciplinary hearings with something more like courts that operate according to the federal judiciary’s procedural rules?
OK, that may sound far-fetched, but check out the statement that 28 members of the Harvard Law School faculty published last week in The Boston Globe. The law professors said the policy Harvard adopted this summer for handling assault complaints didn’t measure up to the body of law “that the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have developed under Title IX and Title VII"—a body of law, they said, that addresses harassment while “protecting students against unfair and inappropriate discipline, honoring individual relationship autonomy, and maintaining the values of academic freedom.”
That’s a pretty high bar for any homegrown disciplinary procedure, even Harvard’s.
The statement said Harvard’s new procedures for handing sexual-harassment complaints “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process” and “are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” While the professors “strongly endorse the importance of protecting our students from sexual misconduct,” they complained that the university’s policy assigns conflicting responsibilities to the Title IX compliance office, including “investigation, prosecution, fact-finding, and appellate review.”
They added that the policy failed to “ensure adequate representation for the accused, particularly for students unable to afford representation,” and failed to give those accused an opportunity for fact-finding and for presenting a defense “at an adversary hearing.”
Harvard officials released a statement defending the policy, which they called “neutral, fair, and objective.” Still, the question remains: Will any college policy prove adequate as more and more students accused of assault counter with lawsuits challenging campus disciplinary findings?
Rush to … Something
Meanwhile, the woman who had lodged a sexual-assault complaint against a freshman quarterback at the University of Florida, Treon Harris, withdrew the complaint last week, just a day after the quarterback’s lawyer put out a news release asserting not only that the woman “was the sexual aggressor in that interaction” but also that another man had “given testimony to law enforcement that he had sexual relations with the alleged victim less than an hour before the alleged sexual conduct with our client took place.”
The news release also said Mr. Harris had cooperated with the investigation fully, agreeing to a search of his dorm room and cellphone and handing over text messages he had exchanged with the woman and the other man. “When these text messages are released, they will show that the young woman making these allegations initiated the conduct with Mr. Harris while he was still in the locker room in Knoxville,” the release said. The university, which had suspended Mr. Harris the day after the allegations were made, lifted the suspension before the week was out.
Ripped From (Our) Headlines
Sure, Winchester U. isn’t real, and many of the characters are stereotyped. But Dear White People, a comedy about black students on an elite, mostly white campus, pushes a lot of buttons nevertheless—and attracted attention at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
The film, which opens nationally this week, centers on a mixed-race young woman who uses her show on the campus radio station to campaign against opening the institution’s one traditionally black dorm to all students. Dear White People arrives in theaters just in time for Halloween, which is convenient since the plot turns on a campus humor magazine’s decision to give its annual Halloween party an “unleash your inner Negro” theme. Raise your hands if you’re cringing because that sounds all too familiar.
Proxmire Revisited
Have you been in higher education long enough to remember Sen. William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece Awards? In monthly news releases, the Wisconsin Democrat frequently mocked research grants given out by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, among other agencies, calling them wasteful. In March 1976, for instance, the award went to the NSF for “spending $46,100 to study the effect of scantily clad women on Chicago’s male drivers.”
Now Republicans on the House Science Committee are going beyond mockery, with investigations into the work of more than 50 researchers who have received federal grants, many of them in anthropology and other social sciences. The committee’s chairman, Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, says taxpayers deserve to understand why their money is being spent on studies like “Picturing Animals in National Geographic” and “Regulating Accountability and Transparency in China’s Dairy Industry.”
But some researchers say the investigations are a witch hunt. “I find it disturbing that the committee apparently thinks they can do a better job of deciding what is in the nation’s interest scientifically than NSF can,” said Mont Hubbard, an emeritus professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California at Davis who is being investigated after receiving an NSF grant for infusing bicycle design with lessons from the aerospace industry to make bikes more useful “for a wider range of tasks.”
Free-Speech Fund
Steven G. Salaita, who was denied a professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this summer after sharply criticizing Israel on Twitter, will get a $5,000 grant from the American Association of University Professors Foundation. The money comes from a fund created to aid “faculty members whose means of support are reduced or cut off because of their involvement in academic-freedom controversies.” Mr. Salaita had resigned his post at Virginia Tech after being offered the Illinois job. He has threatened to sue Illinois unless administrators reverse their last-minute decision not to hire him.
Dots, We Got Dots
Yale University said last week that one of two Ph.D. candidates who had recently returned from doing research on Ebola in Liberia had been hospitalized with “Ebola-like symptoms” and was being kept in isolation. … Chanting “Hands up, don’t shoot,” hundreds of demonstrators marched through the gates of Saint Louis University one night last week as they continued a series of protests prompted by the killing of an unarmed black teenager by police in Ferguson, Mo., in August. The 2 a.m. protest was peaceful. … Debra M. Townsley is not seeking a second five-year contract as president of William Peace University, which she has led during its transition from women’s college to co-educational institution. … Unlike Florida State University, which angered faculty members and others last month by choosing a powerful state senator as its next president, the University of Florida last week picked an academic for its top post: W. Kent Fuchs, currently Cornell University’s provost. … Mexican officials said DNA testing showed that 28 bodies found in a mass grave outside of Iguala, Mexico, did not include those of any of 43 students missing since September 26 from a nearby teachers’ college, the Ayotzinapa Normal School. … Assuming that last week’s stock-market gyrations don’t lead to anything more serious, next year’s college graduates should have an easier time finding jobs than the past few years’ grads have had, according to a hiring survey released last week. —Lawrence Biemiller