COLLEGES CREATED Kangaroo Courts. Obama Institutionalized It. DeVos Desires Due Process.
Serving on a panel that hears Title IX sexual-assault complaints on college campuses sounds like a full-time job. Faculty and students complete a course on sexual assault, the nuances of consent and trauma-informed questioning. Schools lament that this training is time-consuming and costly, but they have only themselves to blame. Sure, the federal government imposes requirements today, and Obama’s DoED pressured colleges to stack the deck against students accused of sexual harassment or assault by denying them the right to due process, but it was colleges that started us down this road. Disciplinary panels were set up in the ’60s to adjudicate violations of schools’ honor codes, but these panels experienced “mission creep” and started hearing cases of actual crimes.
In 1999, Silverglate & Kors documented how colleges across the country had created disciplinary systems that violated students’ due-process rights. Per Silvergate, “College administrators won’t use the real criminal-justice system because they cannot control it, the process would be fair and hence the desired result could not be guaranteed.” As Taylor and Johnson write in their book The Campus Rape Frenzy, “Nothing in the experience of most academics prepares them to competently investigate an offense that’s a felony in all 50 states.” In 2017, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said, “One person denied due process is too many…Due process either protects everyone, or it protects no one. The notion that a school must diminish due-process rights to better serve the ‘victim’ only creates more victims.”NationalReview.History of Campus Courts Obama: What the Feds Have Done to Colleges DeVos & Due Process
