Author Archives

Stuart Taylor, Jr.

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End the Bias in Campus Sexual-Misconduct Tribunals

by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr. are coauthors of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities (Encounter Books, 2017).

Real Clear Politics

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her advisers have made a remarkably good start at ending the Obama administration’s abuse of federal regulatory power to attack the due-process rights of university students accused of sexual assault. But the more important task—the crafting of Title IX regulations to ensure fair treatment for both parties in campus cases—is ahead. Last September, DeVos publicly called for fairness to both sides in campus adjudications. About two weeks later, the Education Department withdrew the Title IX “guidance” that the Obama administration had imposed to specify guilt-presuming procedures for the nation’s colleges and universities to use. DeVos has also ended […]

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You’re Fired!

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The Weekly Standard

As special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI circle ever closer to the Oval Office, Washington is convulsed by speculation that the president may take drastic action to cut short the investigation. Donald Trump has escalated his Twitter attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department, and there is a growing effort among Trump supporters to paint the investigation as hopelessly compromised. The December 1 guilty plea of former national security adviser Michael Flynn will have only intensified Trump’s fears that the special counsel is focused on his family. Trump’s lawyers continue to claim that the president has nothing to […]

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The Title IX Training Travesty

by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr.

The Weekly Standard

In November 2014, a female member of Brown University’s debate team had oral sex with a male colleague while they watched a movie. Eleven months later, she filed a complaint with Brown, accusing him of sexual assault. Both parties in the case had credibility issues; he had violated a no-contact order, she had withheld from the university the bulk of their text messages. But the accused student possessed strong exculpatory evidence. He produced the full record of their communications, which included texts from the accuser to him discussing the encounter in a highly positive fashion and referencing a “plan” to […]

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What Betsy DeVos Gets Right About Campus Sexual Assault

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Time

On Sept. 7, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos took on one of former President Barack Obama’s most controversial regulatory actions: a set of 2011 campus disciplinary procedures for students accused of sexual assault. Arguing that victims of assault were being denied justice, the Obama White House weakened traditional protections for the accused, like presumption of innocence and the right to cross-examine an accuser. DeVos, in a speech at George Mason University, said the system “is shameful, it is wholly un-American, and it is anathema to the system of self-governance to which our Founders pledged their lives over 240 years ago.” Not surprisingly, DeVos was […]

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Overruled

by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr.

The Weekly Standard

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on September 22 formally rescinded the Obama administration’s commands that universities use unfair rules in sexual-misconduct investigations—rules that had the effect of finding more students guilty of sexual assault. And she appears also to be preparing for far more forceful due-process protections down the road. Those follow-on regulations could require schools to presume that accused students are innocent unless proven guilty, to allow rigorous cross-examination of accusers, and perhaps also to grant the accused the unqualified right to appeal adverse decisions, and more. Meanwhile, the modest improvements that DeVos included in the “interim guidance” of September […]

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DeVos Pledges to Restore Due Process

by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor Jr.

Wall Street Journal

The Obama Education Department’s Title IX decree ‘failed too many students,’ she says. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has made clear her intention to correct one of the Obama administration’s worst excesses—its unjust rules governing sexual misconduct on college campuses. In a forceful speech Thursday at Virginia’s George Mason University, Mrs. DeVos said that “one rape is one too many”—but also that “one person denied due process is one too many.” Mrs. DeVos declared that “every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined.” This might seem like an obvious affirmation of fundamental American principles. But such sentiments were […]

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The Trump administration should force colleges to disclose data on race in admissions: Let’s see how preferences work

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NY Daily News

As the Trump administration prepares to investigate a highly plausible but previously neglected 2015 complaint to federal agencies by 64 Asian-American groups that Harvard uses illegal racial admissions quotas to limit Asian-Americans, all sides in the racial-preference controversy wonder whether officials may have bigger things in mind. Although I am very far from being a Trump fan, I hope they do. I especially hope that the administration will force universities that consider race in admissions to disclose for the first time the so-far-closely-guarded data that would expose the nature and size of their preferences and the academic impact on supposed […]

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The Persistently Misleading Media

by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor

The Weekly Standard

The Trump Education Department’s plan to change the Obama administration’s policy on campus rape accusations—a policy that has helped expel countless students who were innocent of any sex crime—set off a frenzied attack by interest groups. In joining this attack, major media outlets have continued a pattern of misrepresenting statistics to justify presuming guilt. The Washington Post led the way by implying that more than 90 percent of students accused of sexual assault are guilty, and that procedural fairness in campus disciplinary proceedings is therefore unimportant—or even harmful to victims. A July 14 Post editorial proclaimed that “the prevalence of false accusations has been […]

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How to End a Campus Injustice With the Stroke of a Pen

by By Stuart Taylor Jr.

Wall Street Journal

The Obama-era Title IX sex-crime regime should give way to real regulations that respect due process. With his legislative agenda in trouble, President Trump could do a lot of good by using his executive power to reverse an egregious example of the Obama administration’s bureaucratic tyranny. I refer to the 2011 command by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, and subsequent orders, forcing thousands of schools to take an aggressive role in the investigation and punishment of alleged sex crimes on college campuses. Under threat of losing federal funds, almost all schools have willingly complied with a procedural regime […]