PETER BERKOWITZ: Trump Can Help Debunk Alleged College “Rape Culture.”
Due process protections for the accused in campus cases alleging sexual assault have been under attack for decades. In the guise of enforcing Title IX—a 1972 federal law prohibiting educational institutions that receive federal funds from discriminating on the basis of sex—the Obama administration intensified the attack.
Restoring due process on campuses does not seem to be a top priority for President Trump and congressional Republicans. If they wish to uphold the rule of law—for men and for women—it should be.
Yes, it should. Plus:
A “rape culture” does not pervade our campuses. Despite a determined campaign of disinformation—to which former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) prominently contributed—the incidence of sexual assault on campus dropped by more than half between 1997 and 2013, is below the off-campus rate, and affects approximately one in 40 women, according to the Department of Justice.
Nevertheless, our universities have curtailed basic civil liberties and perpetrated gross miscarriages of justice. Their attack on due process also obscures the principle source of regretted sexual experience among undergraduates: a campus hook-up culture of alcohol-fueled promiscuity that drives romance, courtship, and love from the undergraduate lexicon.
Those who doubt due process has been degraded in college disciplinary proceedings—and those inclined to believe it but who have yet to acquaint themselves with the hard facts and life-altering consequences of campus justice—should read “The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities” by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. The authors of the indispensable “Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case” have once again performed an outstanding public service. In tale after harrowing tale, they expose “a system on our nation’s campuses in which accused students effectively have to prove their innocence, often under procedures that deny them any meaningful opportunity to do so.”
The authors are anything but partisans. They are not even conservatives.
Nope, but anybody should be upset about this. Well, anybody except Reynolds Online University, Where Nobody Gets Raped!