COMMON APP No Longer Asks Your Criminal History. But Will Ask About Anti-Due Process TIX Disciplinary History
The Common Application decided to “ban the box” starting next year — so the million-plus students who use the online form to apply to some 800 colleges nationwide won’t have to disclose whether they have ever been convicted of a crime. But something was missing from the ‘ban the box’ debate: The question that the Common App is leaving on the application. All schools will still learn whether an applicant has ever been previously disciplined by another school — including, but not limited to, expulsion, suspension and probation. Some of these cases center on allegations of sexual misconduct and get decided behind closed doors on a far lower standard of proof than the high bar required for conviction in criminal court. Think about that. The people who run the Common App are saying they don’t think it’s appropriate to ask about your criminal history — when you have had all of the rights of a criminal defendant, including the right to cross-examination, the power to subpoena evidence and witnesses in your favor and the presumption of innocence unless guilt is proved beyond a reasonable doubt. But they do think it’s important to ask whether some other school, without giving you any of those rights, has found you responsible for something based on a mere preponderance of the evidence. This makes no sense. If bad things that people are accused of doing in the past shouldn’t be relevant to a school’s evaluation of that student, then shouldn’t that apply with even more force when that finding is made without any due process rights and with the lowest burden of proof used to find facts in law?
washingtonpost.com By Justin Dillon, Scott Bernstein
