Tag Archives: Academia/Political Correctness

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Discredited Sex Assault Research Infects U.S. Legal System

by Linda LeFauve & Stuart Taylor, Jr.

Real Clear Politics

When a toxin enters a biological ecosystem, its effect is magnified as it moves up the food chain. Even if it can be cut off at the source, the ever-widening distribution of its increasingly harmful form can cause problems for decades. Misinformation functions in a similar fashion, gaining traction as it’s repeated by increasingly high-profile individuals who venture ever further from the source material. In this manner, distortion about the facts of sexual assault has affected the training of judges, prosecutors, and other law enforcement officials. It is how misleading assertions become embedded in criminal and military law. This is […]

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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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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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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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Until Proven Guilty: The vanishing of due process in campus rape tribunals

by Stuart Taylor, Jr. and KC Johnson

National Review

When it comes to due process on campus, Republicans in Congress, who campaigned on vows to rein in the Obama administration’s abuses of executive power, have largely acquiesced in its bureaucratic imposition of quasi-judicial tyranny. For more than four years, the White House and the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) have used an implausible reinterpretation of a 1972 civil-rights law to impose mandates unimagined by the law’s sponsors. It has forced almost all of the nation’s universities and colleges to disregard due process in disciplinary proceedings when they involve allegations of sexual assault. Enforced by officials far outside […]

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CNN Panel Discussion on Sex Assault on Campus

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CNN.com

While there are infuriating episodes of disgusting, inexcusable male behavior on college campuses,  some shown in CNN’s film “The Hunting Ground,” the film as a whole was not an honest documentary but rather slick propaganda. It gravely distorts the facts of some of the cases it discusses; falsely suggests that there is a campus rape “epidemic” by promoting alarmist statistics that had been amply discredited before the firm aired; and hypes a campus “rape culture” that does not exist. It also ignores how the disciplinary process in American colleges and universities has been  pervasively slanted, under Obama Administration pressure, to presume the […]

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A Smoking-Gun E-mail Exposes the Bias of ‘The Hunting Ground’

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National Review

A so-called documentary about campus rape, The Hunting Ground, is set to air Thursday on CNN, which co-produced it. But a newly available e-mail from an investigative producer of the film spectacularly belies its pretensions to be honest, balanced journalism. Instead, the e-mail adds to the large body of evidence that that the film is highly misleading if not dishonest.

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Is The New York Times Smearing Jameis Winston?

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Real Clear Sports

Over the past year The New York Times has published thousands of words about the rape allegation against Heisman Trophy-winning Florida State University quarterback Jameis Winston, all pointing to a single conclusion: He is guilty, and the state of Florida and his school have excused his crime because of his football prowess. But there is a large body of evidence that The Times has kept from its readers that would lead a discerning reader to another conclusion: that Winston has been cleared by three separate investigations because the evidence […]