The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual-assault and harassment allegations.  In one of its least defensible actions, the Obama administration used its Office for Civil Rights to impose its preferred procedures for handling sexual-assault cases on all the universities in the country that receive federal funds. It did it via a 19-page “Dear Colleague” letter, in the name of Title IX, the provision in federal law prohibiting sexual discrimination in education. The process was terrible. It blew right by the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires public notice and comment before such rules go into effect.  The Obama rules have been receiving a battering in the courts, where due process is still taken seriously. A US district court judge wrote in a 2016 ruling against Brandeis University: “If a college student is to be marked for life as a sexual predator, it is reasonable to require that he be provided a fair opportunity to defend himself and an impartial arbiter to make that decision. Put simply, a fair determination of the facts requires a fair process, not tilted to favor a particular outcome, and a fair and neutral fact-finder, not predisposed to reach a particular conclusion.”

nypost.com By Rich Lowry

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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

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