@al2simon, I disagree with you on how you are measuring success. More women are reporting. I doubt the increase is due entirely to women making things up. Imo, the atmosphere is improving for women.
With the pushback against the preponderance of evidence standard, has anybody legally tried to get the standard changed? Sounds like no schools are.
I think you are making good points when discussing why the logic is flawed. (I don’t want to get into a logical argument with you. I might lose. )
I am not caving 100 percent on the preponderance of evidence standard. I have no problem going to a clear and convincing standard.
I think one of the biggest issues is some people are comparing what the colleges are doing with the criminal justice system. These cases are not criminal cases. To eliminate the schools ability to handle these cases, makes every case a possible criminal case. I find this ridiculous. I have already written about this. This increases the standards to an intolerable level.
If we stop comparing what the schools are doing to criminal cases, I think there is room for a compromise that works better and satisfies nobody.
I don’t know how your company works but my prior company fired people who were never charged with a crime.
I don’t know why schools should have a more difficult time dealing with these issues compared to any other entitities including businesses.
@ohiodad51, blew off the safety issue. The safety issue is a huge issue.
On page 11, Footnote 26, of DCL, the 3 cases the OCR references (Desert Palace v. Costa, Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, Jennings v. UNC) were all federal civil cases, not administrative hearings.
Regardless, aren’t people entitled to be represented by lawyers, to conduct discovery and to present evidence, and to examine witnesses in EEOC / Title VII administrative hearings? I don’t know - I’ve never been in one; this type of litigation was always too minor for me to get involved with - however, even though IMO someone not getting promoted at a job is not nearly as consequential as a student getting expelled for rape, we still give both sides a lot more protection when holding these hearings in the interest of fairness and of being able to determine the truth.
“has anybody legally tried to get the standard changed? Sounds like no schools are.”
It may yet happen, but I’d never advise a school to try it. It would be a great way to attract a ton of negative publicity and political headaches. You can picture the headlines: Whoville State is demanding the right to protect rapists! Even if 100 schools all agree that the standard is bad, it’s a foolish risk for any one of them to stick their neck out for a change.
“I don’t know why schools should have a more difficult time dealing with these issues compared to any other entity including businesses.”
It’s not about the difficulty; it’s about the stakes. Almost everybody gets fired/let go once or more in their careers nowadays. That’s not much of a red flag to future employers, and for their own reasons, employers almost universally have the policy of not commenting on their former employees. There’s no equivalent of a transcript for future employers to see.
In contrast, almost no one gets expelled from college, it’s a huge and universally recognized red flag, it goes on the transcript, and all future transfer or graduate schools must require that transcript for accreditation reasons. So unless we’re talking about losing a tenured or union position, being fired doesn’t constrain your future options the way being expelled from college does.
Also, most of us see the student-university relationship quite differently from the employer-employee relationship. Employees are hired to serve the employer’s interests, period. Employers aren’t offering them a service. Students are sort of customers and sort of beneficiaries of universities. I think most CC parents (and I) view the university as something like a clan of elders who guide young people into adulthood. It’s a caring relationship, not just a business arrangement. A college that treats students the way McDonald’s fires a worker who came in late is not what CC folks are looking for. Witness the recent thread about the Mt. St. Mary’s college president and his willingness to drown the weak bunnies. Yikes.
@Hanna, are you seeing transcripts that say…“expelled due to sexual assault” when dealing with these cases?
I actually know somebody who was kicked out of college because of a he said/ she said sexual assault type case. This might come as a surprise to a few posters. I know the family pretty well.
The transcripts don’t say anything about sexual assault. I think the guy is a good guy.
I don’t know what happened that caused the student to be kicked out. I wasn’t there.
Despite not knowing exactly what happened, like some friend of Montague, maybe I will give a 2 hour interview to the Daily Mail in the UK.
How about attorneys outside the college system pushing for a change in the standard used in these cases?
Well number one, families pay for the permission for their kids to attend college. I don’t pay a company to keep me employed. I’m at will. They are at will. If they don’t like the clothes I wear they can probably find a way to ease me out of the company. However a business may never give false information to another employer. A company would probably never tell another employer that an employee was fired for sexual misconduct unless that person were found guilty of sexual misconduct by a court…they would open themselves up to a defamation lawsuit. If colleges expelled kids and reimbursed them for the semester loss of tuition and none of the back story was given to another college I might be able to shut my eyes and pretend this abominable system wasn’t happening and that it was akin to an at will employer/employee relationship, but colleges aren’t doing that.
They are kicking kids out of college resulting in a) branding as a sexual predator in public, b) reporting it to other colleges, c) not refunding the tuition and d) making somewhat arbitrary decisions sometimes based on hearsay e) sometimes not allowing kids to defend themselves against false accusations, f) not engaging the criminal system and all the protections afforded to both parties when the accusation clearly fits criminal definition. Heck some of these accusers are legally exposed to civil charges based on their own actions.
Anyone who thinks these college things are confidential has their head in the sand. I don’t think you can improve the system because a system already exists for criminal accusations AND if the accusation is not criminal and is more flawed (e.g. the kid isn’t a threat to the entire college population) then expulsion and the aftermath of a system that essentially prohibits a kid from vacating and attending another college is far too punitive. Expel them after a court says they are criminals. Grant them a leave of absence while it works it’s way through the courts if it gets that far. Put them both in mandatory counseling. Let them part ways with their educational record that they paid for in tact ifi that’s best for the involved parties. That’s fair. But oh well, we’ll still have to wait a few months to see if this kid was the victim or she was the victim or they were both victims of a stupid system.
“@Hanna, are you seeing transcripts that say…“expelled due to sexual assault” when dealing with these cases?”
Some say that, some don’t, but few schools will accept an expelled (or suspended) student without an explanation of the circumstances. So if you want to be considered, and you don’t want to lie, you have to disclose why you were expelled even if the transcript doesn’t specify.
I think we would end up back to the Flintstones era if we did what you wanted.
I am not sure why you should have the right to vote.
In the case I know, this is not true. Not every case is in the public eye. Most aren’t. Now maybe the case I know is an exception. There is nothing about an assault in this guy’s transcript.
It is true in this case. The activists called him a rapist. They verbally and visually claimed the team was “supporting a rapist”. There is no question and plenty of photographic evidence that the campus activists branded him a rapist using the word “rapis” with no more knowledge about this situation than any of us here have. The college had to tell the campus to tamp down the rhetoric.They absolutely most certainly branded him as a rapist. Calling someone a “rapist” is a very serious charge, and shouldn’t be done without evidence and due process or it’s clearly defamation.
Why don’t we wait and see what happens to Montague?
Of course we may never know.
And what is happening in the Montague case doesn’t happen to everybody who is accused. Who got expelled from Yale for sexual assault late last year. Is that public knowledge?
We’ve already seen what has happened to Montague, regardless of whether he’s successful in his lawsuit. I don’t know why who else may have been accused of sexual assault is relevant. It seems that because it’s Yale, it’s assumed by many that of course they had good reason to expel him. I doubt that everyone would be as willing to accept the same action from East Nebraska State (no idea if that’s a real school) under the exact same circumstances.
@joblue, I guess I am guilty of assuming Yale had good cause to expel Montague. But here’s the thing: if YALE can’t get this right, with its billions in resources and undisputedly brilliant staff of decisionmakers at its disposal, then is ANY college capable of getting this right? Or should this inherently flawed system be dismantled?
If this were East Nebraska State or another non-selective school, Montague would probably have left the University and transferred well before he was expelled.
What I don’t understand is that if you are a male in this situation and you are charged in this Kafkaesque system, why not withdraw from school and transfer before the hearings are final and go on your record? I can understand Montague sticking it out since he was heavily vested in Yale, but these committees take some time to reach a conclusion and I would think the vast majority of people accused would be better off withdrawing and starting over at another institution and avoiding a potential permanent charge of rape going on your record.
Most of the expelled students aren’t exposed in public this way. Their sudden disappearance from campus will be noted in their social circles, and that’s as far as it goes. It’s mainly the important private disclosures to schools and employers that worry me.
I wish that more courts would permit “John Doe” filings in these matters, where the plaintiff’s name is sealed. That’s a huge factor in whether many students sue – a bigger factor than the strength of their claims. In effect, a lot of universities are protected from suit no matter what they do wrong because the cost to the plaintiff of suing under their own name is too high. The most important cases in the courts right now are Doe v. Reed and Doe v. Brown, and neither would have reached this point without anonymity.
But I thought we all agreed that Yale didn’t hold a criminal hearing and thus would have no right to determine that this student is a rapist. He was found to have violated the civil rights of another student under Title IX, which is all they can find.
@prospect1 For me, it’s a loss of faith in Yale’s ability to “get it right” after that Halloween letter debacle . I don’t think the Christakis’s were treated fairly by the University or their colleagues after that incident as I hear that EriKa was pretty much forced to resign and her husband forced to take a sabbatical…
I don’t think they did anything so egregious as to warrant dismissal (albeit voluntarily) from the university…
These two incidents don’t sit well with me and quite frankly I’m glad my son isn’t going to Yale.
“How hard is it to get “sexual assault” erased from a transcript? Do you have to sue to get the words sexual assault removed?”
I’ve seen records altered through negotiation. At best, it’s still going to involve expensive counsel, and maybe the threat of suit. The Sterett solution – we agree that I will not reapply, but you tell other schools that I’m eligible to return – can sometimes work as a compromise. But most of the time, the school decides what it decides, and that’s what’s on the record. Historically, filing suit hasn’t been a successful tactic very often, but that may be changing.
I hope to have a lot more data to share in the next few months. I have 15+ open cases right now, and a number of them will be hearing back from transfer schools in May.
We have a community college system. I think they take everybody. Those are two year schools. I don’t know what the transferring prospects are from there. I don’t think a student is going to get into a “name” private school from a community college too often. Maybe an athlete?
As a Yale parent, the spin and misinformation spewed by the mainstream press and its commenters is what doesn’t sit well with me.
The Christakis’s wer NOT dismissed from the university, voluntarily or involuntarily. They are continuing in the role of master and associate master of their residential college–their removal from that role was the “demand” from Next Yale, and it wasn’t met. NC is taking a sabbatical, but there’s no suggestion that he won’t be back. EC is an adjunct, promoting a book–a pretty natural reason for not teaching in the spring. Students were largely disappointed that she wasn’t teaching, and the school has publicly invited her to come back. From what I’ve read recently, it sounds like she may be jumping back into the pre-school classrooms she has studied.
As far as the disciplinary proceedings go, I agree with most of the above. Montague, it should be noted, was not branded as a rapist until the team chose to wear t-shirts supporting him on television. Before then, the public line was that he withdrew from the college for personal reasons. The “branding” was a bad reaction to a bad reaction. I blame the coach for not seeing the big picture and clamping down on his team quickly–for everyone’s good.
I also know of a specific case where a student (not at Yale) was absolutely guilty of an expellable sexual offense against a younger classmate. He was allowed to withdraw from the school before his case was formally heard and has gone on to live his life without much consequence. It happens.
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