Dartmouth:
Scroll down for article:
http://thedartmouth.com/2013/04/page/26/
Cannot find the survey where I saw MIT has always used PPE but I am reasonably confident I am correct. Princeton just conformed in 2014 and I remember an article in The Tech - MIT’s newspaper- reporting that Princeton was finally aligning themselves with everyone else.
@dstark - To be honest, it’s very hard to understand what FIRE’s figures mean. They just aren’t giving enough detail. But I think the picture you are painting is misleading.
So, if you’re analyzing the “Top 100” colleges (it appears FIRE is excluding liberal arts colleges), you need to distinguish between public and private colleges. I think about 45 of the top 100 are public universities (0 of the top 10). That leaves 55 privates. Does FIRE mean that 39 of these were going to have to change? If so, that’s almost 70% of privates that weren’t using preponderance - but honestly I can’t tell exactly what FIRE is saying.
I think the first 70% figure you quoted is very misleading (if not completely wrong) if for no other reason than that it doesn’t seem to distinguish publics from privates.
I also believe that the AAUP was insisting on the use of clear and convincing as well.
The other thing I can tell you is that OCR was forcing institutions to change their standard of evidence in the 2 or 3 years before DCL. They issued DCL in 2011 so that they didn’t need to force the colleges to do this one-by-one. I have no idea how many of the Top 100 changed before DCL, but they may not be reflected in your figures and would need to be added.
The problem isn’t “preponderance”. It’s a larger due process problem. The standard of evidence is just one part of this.
Preponderance is used in civil litigation all the time. Of course it can work. But in civil litigation it’s combined with the right to legal representation, ability to conduct discovery and cross-examination, an independent judge and/or jury, etc, etc. that make up the entire due process package.
The problem is using a lower standard without the other protections. Colleges used clear and convincing because they knew that their processes weren’t as good as a court’s and they didn’t think they could recreate the judicial system. They needed to strike a balance, and in my opinion using clear and convincing got the balance right.
Look, I get that the unfairness doesn’t bother you very much. But I’d be willing to bet my last dollar that if you were a respondent subject to these rules in civil ligation you’d be screaming bloody murder about how unfair it was.
To me, it’s very important to balance everyone’s rights. More importantly, what I’m outlining aren’t just my own views. They are the views of people who’ve spend decades on the front lines of these issues and really understand the dynamics.
While I don’t have data on what every school was using, I get the impression it was a “free for all.” There was no clear cut mandate - schools could do what they wanted. Stanford and UNC were using the criminal standard so that alone tells you there was unlimited leeway. Brown just made one up - cases were decided upon I think something like a “reasonable basis.”
Let me go on the record as stating that I too believe it is essential to balance everyone’s rights and to attempt to have a system that is as fair as possible to both parties. I don’t want to speak for @dstark, but I am going to bet that he would have no problem with those objectives either.
You are wrong about me.
I am talking specifically about the preponderance of evidence standard.
Obviously you can have the preponderance of evidence standard and other safeguards.
You did write this…
@HarvestMoon1, thanks. Honestly, the more I think about it, I can’t remember whether MIT was involved in the fight with this or the anti trust suit over financial aid.
@Ohiodad51 - going back to the EEOC hearings for a second. Aren’t they able to award monetary sanctions? Things like compensatory, punitive and liquidated damages?
I am just thinking that for a relatively new company that employs the necessary 15 people to be covered, couldn’t something like a $50,000 judgment potentially put them out of business? And then are the damage caps imposed by the EEOC binding in any litigation that might be commenced by the complainant?
This is slightly relevant because I was a respondent. 
Officially I received due process. Reality is a different story.
I settled the case. These are my questions. Is this public record? I am assuming my settlement is public record somewhere
Can an attorney search for my name in a legal database and find my name and my settlement. Can the government?
I’m curious. I have a good friend who is an attorney and he is always asking me if I settled the case.
I wonder if this is a question where my friend already knows the answer.
There are different phases of EEOC hearings. The initial phase, which usually results in a right to sue letter, is in part designed to determine whether the EEOC wants to take the issue as a violation of statute/reg. If they do, then yes fines can be imposed (I don’t know what the cap is, it may be 50k). But at that stage the process looks much more like a civil legal process with discovery, examination of witnesses and ultimately an appeal to a court.
And no, damage caps imposed in EEOC hearings are not binding in subsequent litigation brought by any complsintant. Assuming a right to sue letter issued (as far as I know)
The filing of a case and its docket is usually public. So anyone who knows your name and the court can see an entry which likely says settled and dismissed at whomever’s cost. But the actual settlement agreement is not a public document unless one of the parties was a governmental entity. The parties are of course free to disclose the terms of the settlement as long as there is no confidentiality Claus (there usually is) but it does not happen automatically
@ohiodad51, thanks.
Oh…you need the court. Hmmmm. My friend might know that. He asked me what court. I hope I confused him. He doesn’t know the judge.
During the time I signed the settlement agreement and the judge approved it, I was told not to say anything. I can’t remember if it was in the document
that the settlement is still confidential. I don’t feel like looking at it anymore.
@Ohiodad51, You’re a good sport.
Interesting discussion…but why assume that the preponderance of evidence standard isn’t–with rare, much publicized exceptions–working?
According to the Department of Justice’s fairly stringent definition of sexual assault, which it says is shaped from a criminal justice standard, there was an average of 4.7 sexual assaults per 1000 female students enrolled in college (post-secondary education) from 2007-20113. Yale has a broader definition of sexual assault (and thus reports a larger average number of assaults), but its online Sexual Misconduct Scenarios suggest that expulsion would be a penalty only for situations that pretty clearly meet the DofJ’s narrower definition.
And its annual Report of Complaints of Sexual Misconduct suggests that it holds to that standard. Yale has approximately 2700 female students. According to its most recent annual report, one student was expelled in 2014 for sexual misconduct. Many more students are put on probation and restricted from contacting the complainants. It’s a given that every sexual assault is not reported, but the number of expulsions seem well below the DofJ’s statistics/standard. Is the system really broken?
It’s not clear at all that the system is “really broken.” It’s not even clear that, as applied by college committees, the “preponderance of the evidence” standard really differs from “clear and convincing evidence.” It stands to reason that administrators will not impose serious sanctions on a student (and including them in the student’s permanent transcript) without being pretty firmly convinced they are right, no matter what the standard of proof is in theory.
I would submit, though, that a couple of things are clear"
First, there is a general lack of confidence in the system. Advocates for women still don’t think they are active and victim-friendly enough, and are full of stories of how victims are denied justice. On the other side, there seems to be a steady drip of really outrageous cases where some hapless boy is kicked out of college for something that the vast majority of people do not consider bad behavior worthy of expulsion. Furthermore,descriptions of the process at administrative hearings (as well as the OCR letter) do not really comport with traditional ideas about due process for serious sanctions. So there is a lot of skepticism about how colleges are handling this, and it’s being exacerbated by political discourse on both sides.
Second, there is a serious issue with sexual assault and consent in colleges (and I think likely also among college-age people outside college). Not everyone is innocent; many, many people are doing things that they shouldn’t. Colleges are right to try to do something about this. I’m just not sure holding sex court is the right way to go about it.
Third, I think pretty much all of us are glad we are not college students today, dealing with these issues. At least I am.
I think this is a great point that @classicalmama made.
How many expulsions are there?
I would like to see more data. This is from the years 2012-2013, a limited number of schools and some schools only reported 6 months of data.
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/local/how-colleges-resolve-sexual-assault-cases/1511/
I don’t think my old school has done well.
There was a story in the local Sunday paper yesterday, about sexual assaults by higher ups at UC Berkeley…the punishments are not uniformly carried out.
But I want to highlight this…
Here is a chart. I don’t see a lot of expulsions.
I think where I live the median age is 50. It is definitely not 20. I can’t believe the number of expulsions at UC Berkeley is similar to the amount of sexual assaults where I live.
http://sexualassault.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/CSCDataforCALegislature1.7.15.pdf
At UC Berkeley, the non-consensual sex numbers are extremely low too. This does affect the dismissal numbers.
So many questions about this Yale case.
Why did the Title IX administrator bring the case to the tribunal a year after the alleged event? Some have said that the woman involved wanted to get revenge on Montague because of , but she didn’t bring the case. If she’d wanted revenge, wouldn’t she have made the accusation herself? When did the information about the alleged offense first come to the attention of the Title IX administrator? Why didn’t she bring the case forward herself?
I’m wondering if the administrator knew about this alleged incident for some time before the accusation was brought for a formal hearing, but felt there wasn’t enough proof, and then a second similar accusation came out, and the administrator then decided to go back and bring the first case.
Yale doesn’t usually expel students even when it finds them guilty of sexual intercourse without consent. And I operate on the principle that the administration is not composed of idiots. Moreover, this was going to be a high-profile case. So there must be a lot more that we don’t know. It’s hard for me to believe that in this particular high-profile case, this guy was expelled on he-said she-said with no other evidence; they’re not idiots at Yale.
I find this case very interesting.
The accuser goes public.
We read about the accused suing. I think there are more accusers suing under title 9, but in this case, she sues the school.
It will be interesting to see how many people were assaulted.
I don’t think this is easy for schools. There is more than one accusation against the same guy.
As more and more women find it acceptable to go public, I think sexual assaults will decrease.
What do you do with the accused student in this Kansas case? She says that he overpowered her and raped her. SHe didn’t report the rape because she thought she wouldn’t be believed. There is virtually no chance that in the alleged circumstances he would be prosecuted by police.
Then she learned that another rower on her team said she’d been assaulted too. So she reported the guy.
So now, you are the Kansas administration. You have accusations that a football player overpowered and raped two different students. In both cases, it’s he-said she-said. For those of you who think that schools should not be in the business of adjudicating rape accusations, is this someone you want to keep on your campus?
@"CardinalFang: My best guess about how this case found it’s way to Yale’s tribunal is as follows. And I stress that it is just a guess.
An accuser can choose to pursue a claim either formally through the University Wide Committee or pursue an informal claim via the Title IX coordinator. Since it was the Title IX coordinator that brought the issue to the UWC I have to believe that the woman actually went to the Title IX Coordinator with the intent of pursuing an informal resolution. Under the UWC polices a Title IX coordinator can bring a complaint to the UWC for formal investigation under 3 circumstances. Only one seemed to be relevant here:
The UWC can proceed on that information from the Title IX coordinator based upon this provision in their policy:
I can’t locate the language right now but I also distinctly remember reading in Yale’s Title IX documentation that the Title IX Coordinator has a responsibility to balance the wishes of the accuser on how to proceed against the safety and welfare of the campus community.
I can only speculate that the Coordinator either had knowledge of previous complaints or that there was actual evidence that there was a violation under the sexual assault policy.