AL FRANKEN, Title IX and The Perils Of Rushing To Judgment
In a recent issue of The New Yorker, the prominent journalist Jane Mayer has written a piece that is highly critical of the frenzy that led to the forced resignation of Al Franken from the Senate. Mayer described Franken’s fall as “stunningly swift”—so swift that it left far too little time to sort the facts. In retrospect, it seems that the woman who accused Franken of sexually harassing her at a U.S.O. tour in Afghanistan made a number of inaccurate statements. The Franken situation contains a number of lessons for universities that are responding to accusations of sexual assault or harassment by their students. Perhaps the most important one is not to rush to judgment. Unfortunately, the courts are far too lax about allowing universities to proceed at breakneck speed in expelling accused students.
An excellent example of this is the case Yu v. Vassar College, where a student [her Dad is a Vassar Prof] filed a complaint against Peter Yu a full year after the alleged sexual assault. Numerous exchanges between the two students seemed to negate any inference that she felt endangered by him or that he was threatening her in any way. Nonetheless, once the student filed her complaint Vassar moved so quickly against him that he stood no real chance at defending himself. He was expelled eight days after he first saw the charges and only three days after he was first allowed to review the file. He brought legal action to contest his expulsion, but the court held that students have no right to see the charges against them or any evidence in a timely manner.
As for Franken, Mayer reports that getting #MeToo’ed has “led him to spend time thinking about such matters as due process and proportionality of punishment.” There is definitely some irony here, considering that a few months before his downfall, Franken was among the Democratic senators opposing attempts to reform federal guidelines on campus sexual assault to give more protections to the accused.
