MORE HIGHER EDUCATION NEWS: “A federal judge has ordered Brown University to turn over fund-raising and donation documents sought by lawyers in a case involving a former student who says he was falsely accused of rape and pressured to leave the university. . . . The former student, William McCormick III, was suspended in 2006 following “sexual misconduct” charges and later agreed to leave Brown permanently, but he says in a lawsuit that he did so under duress. In 2009, he sued Brown, the student who accused him, and her father, a wealthy Brown alumnus and donor, arguing that his accuser’s father had used his sway at the university to influence how administrators handled the allegations. . . . Historically, students who have contested a college’s finding of sexual misconduct have argued that they didn’t receive due process or the proceedings were fundamentally unfair. Mr. McCormick and his lawyers are reaching for broader information—including fund-raising records—to show the proceedings were biased.”

I love it that Brown regards the secrecy of its fund-raising records as “sacrosanct,” as opposed to, I dunno, due process, I guess: “FIRE has been checking into some of the due process protections for students who are accused of sexual assault or sexual harassment at Brown and other universities nationwide. One of our findings is that Brown uses the lowest standard of evidence among the top 100 U.S. colleges and universities (as ranked by U.S. News & World Report). It is bad enough that the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) earlier this year mandated the lowest possible standard of proof, “preponderance of the evidence” (or a 50.01% standard), which threatens students’ due process rights and forces most of the Ivy League schools to lower their standards and, accordingly, their accuracy in such cases. (FIRE has explained this problem at length.) But even worse, Brown’s policy doesn’t even go for a standard of proof; it has gone lower. Brown requires only a ‘reasonable basis’ for a finding of guilt in these cases, even if the majority of the evidence is on the other side.”