K.C. JOHNSON & STUART TAYLOR: Betsy DeVos is right: In college sexual assault cases, due process matters.

A system in which a wrongly accused student’s best chance of vindication comes after his college improperly brands him a rapist, and only if he can afford an expensive and protracted lawsuit, is a travesty of justice. Moreover, despite some suggestions by defenders of Obama policies that colleges have responded to these court decisions by creating fairer procedures for accused students, the reverse has been far more typical. Amidst legal challenges, schools including Brown and Swarthmore adjusted their policies to make it harder for innocent students to win vindication, by scaling back the rights promised to accused students. Reflecting this mindset, the National Association of College and University Attorneys published a May 2016 research note urging colleges and universities to “promptly destroy” documents such as “e-mails … staff notes, … notes of hearing participants during a disciplinary hearing, drafts of hearing outcome reports, and other such working papers,” all of which “might actually prove very useful to a plaintiff’s lawyer” in a subsequent lawsuit.

Why does Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) hate college men?