WHEN PETTY TYRANTS BECOME NOT-SO-PETTY: K.C. Johnson On Yale And The Montague Case.
Again, the justification for these denials of basic due process is that no one is accusing the student of rape.
How, then, to reconcile this fiction with posters that blanketed the Yale campus asking the Yale basketball team to “stop supporting a rapist” [emphasis added]?
When the alleged disciplinary offense is the same as a felony, the idea that deny due process serves the interests of fairness is preposterous.
(2) Of the media coverage of this issue, one article handled the issue responsibly. In the New Haven Register, Chip Malafronte wrote: “There is no record of an arrest or court hearing involving Montague on file with the Connecticut judicial branch.”
Every article on this case should contain such a sentence. How can someone be a “rapist” if he hasn’t even been charged with a crime—much less convicted?
Because calling him a rapist makes white, upper-class women feel good about themselves, and making white, upper-class women feel good about themselves is the supreme value in our society today, especially at expensive private schools.
Plus:
Yale has never explained why it chose to redefine a term commonly understood in both culture and the law. And at this stage, it’s not public what specific allegations Montague even faced. But to the extent he faced allegations that don’t fit the definition of sexual assault, and as a result of Yale’s actions he has now publicly been branded a “rapist” in campus posters, it would seem that he has suffered real harm from Yale’s peculiar use of the dictionary. . . . In an official statement, Yale unsurprisingly (and appropriately in this instance) shielded itself behind FERPA and declined comment.
But, incredibly, an agent of the Yale administration took a different course. As quoted by Malafronte, the Yale Women’s Center released a public statement purporting to “speculate” and then adding: “[W]e can comfortably say that, should all of this be true, this is progress. It seems that a survivor felt that coming forward was a viable option and that they got the decisive outcome that they likely fought hard for . . . Though we can only speculate as to the intent behind the basketball team’s shirt protest, the team’s actions appeared to be a dismissal of the very real threat of sexual violence.”
In other words: an official Yale agency all but confirmed that Montague was expelled for “sexual violence.”
Between the publication of the Register article and this morning, someone (Yale’s general counsel, perhaps?) appears to have spoken to the Women’s Center, which released a modified statement “recogniz[ing] that FERPA and Yale policy prohibit Yale from commenting on the exact nature of any specific incident.”
But the Women’s Center has already commented. Its comment all but confirmed the rumors. And that comment, along with the harm it caused, can’t be undone.
He’s only a man. His feelings and life don’t matter.