Exciting news. Last week the Trump administration finally pushed through their new Title IX rules for adjudication of rape on campus, introducing more due process rights for the accused.
Hopefully this brings to an end the recent shameful history of male students being denied basic legal protections when facing campus sexual misconduct allegations. It’s clever timing from Education Secretary Betsy de Vos, with no students on campuses to mount noisy demonstrations and feminist lawyers confined to voom meetings to plot their next moves.
Within hours of the new regime being announced, Democrat presidential hopeful Joe Biden declared he would reverse these changes if he becomes president .
The hypocrisy of the man. Biden’s presidential campaign may well come unstuck over allegations that he sexually assaulted a former aide, Tara Reade, and indulged in inappropriate touching of a string of women – charges Biden strenuously denies. He’s passionately arguing the voting public should give him the benefit of the doubt, to presume his innocence.
But few American politicians have done more to undermine the presumption of innocence in sexual assault claims than Biden. As KC Johnson, author of The Campus Rape Frenzy, has put it, ‘Perhaps no major American political figure has so consistently championed the erosion of due process of those accused of sexual misconduct’.
As this recent spiked.com article on “the shameless hypocrisy of Joe Biden” explains, Biden was a key player in the Obama move to require publicly funded universities to enforce the unfair Title IX regulations, openly declaring he was using the campuses for social engineering of these feminist policies. “We need a fundamental change in our culture. And the quickest way to change culture is to change it on [the] campuses of America.’
In her recent politico.com article, Emily Yoffe explains that “Joe Biden created the culture he is a target of” –by encouraging the Obama administration “to expand the definition of sexual violence to include compliments, or the kind of touching—often unasked for, and sometimes unwelcome—that Biden has engaged in for years.”
Yoffe adds, “There is an irony at work here: Biden helped to make possible a world in which long-ago and trivial accusations can upend one’s reputation and career.”
Here’s the man who pronounced “Drunk sex is rape, is rape, is rape.” Listen to this excellent spiked-online podcast : https://www.spiked-online.com/podcast-episode/neil-fergusons-staggering-hypocrisy/
It is hardly surprising that many are watching Biden getting his comeuppance with considerable glee. Not least the battered universities which have taken the financial hit from losing the majority of over 400 civil actions taken over the failure to protect legal rights of accused students. And there’s the huge costs of paying for the army of HR campus bureaucrats to administer the now discredited tribunal system.
Meanwhile, in Australia…
Our own higher education sector is in huge trouble after Corona has wiped out their lucrative overseas student market. Here too, it should be the perfect time for universities to get their house in order and make the sensible decision to return to their core business of providing sound education rather than wasting valuable resources on reckless and illegal efforts to usurp the criminal law system.
Late last year we had the Queensland Supreme Court’s decision in the UQ medical student case, declaring such processes illegal. Then Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan instructed the universities, through the university regulator, TEQSA, to leave such matters to the criminal courts.
But it appears most universities still have policies on their books for determining sexual assault allegations. In January this year my supporters sent letters to universities across the country asking for details of these policies. We have had answers from 16 of the 38 such institutions and are in the process of analysing and compiling data to summarise the current situation.
It appears most universities are still in the business. Some claim to be awaiting the appeal of the UQ case – a dubious argument given that this case exposed blatant injustices which exist in almost all the university policies. Universities uniformly are making judgements about these criminal matters using a lower standard of proof – the balance of probabilities – and very few allow legal representation for students facing investigation by university committees.
And even if students are acquitted in criminal courts, they can still face misconduct investigations by the universities using that lower standard of proof. The penalties faced in these circumstances can include withholding degrees – stealing a commodity which cost that student years of his life and many thousands of dollars – penalties certainly not prescribed in statutes for sexual assault charges.
We are taking further steps to expose the universities’ inaction on this issue to public scrutiny. Please contact me if you would like