By Christopher J. Scalia
Sunday, January 24, 2021
It’s no surprise that President Biden seeks to undo many
rules and regulations issued by the Trump administration, including the
Department of Education’s new
rules governing hearings for college students accused of sexual assault.
Before doing so, however, the Biden team should consider issues raised by a
recent Washington Post story, which
unwittingly reflects an inconsistent view of what constitutes fairness for
accused students.
The story in question is a front-page
account of one black cadet’s experiences with racism at the Virginia
Military Institute, focusing on two events in Rafael Jenkins’s time at VMI. The
first is horrifying: During “hell week” — the grueling training program that
new cadets undergo before classes begin — Jenkins avoided reciting the names of alumni who had died fighting for
the Confederacy. According to the Post,
a white cadet confronted Jenkins, “got up in his face and said firmly in his
ear: ‘Jenkins, if you don’t sound off, I’m going to lynch you . . . and use
your dead corpse as a punching bag.’” That cadet was suspended from the school.
The second episode, which led to Jenkins’s own departure
from VMI, is where the Post runs into
problems.
Toward the end of his freshman year, Jenkins was called
before the honor court on charges that he cheated during an exam; the cadet
members of the court found him guilty by a 6–1 vote. The paper catalogues
several problems with the hearing; as a former faculty adviser to a college
honor court, I would have advised against some of the decisions VMI’s court
made. But other complaints from the Post
ring hollow.
Foremost among those is the suggestion that the honor
court’s nonunanimous policy is unfair. According to the story, “Unanimous jury
verdicts have long been considered constitutionally required in federal courts
for serious crimes. In April, the Supreme Court ruled that unanimity is
required in such cases for state courts, too, and said that non-unanimous jury
verdicts were rooted in Jim Crow racial discrimination laws.”
Although the Post
implies that someone accused of cheating on an exam deserves the same
protection as someone accused of the “serious crimes” the Court ruled on in
April, that comparison is a stretch. Violating an honor code is undoubtedly a
serious matter in an academic setting — but it is not a crime. It is comparable
to other serious matters that are handled as civil offenses, such as
defamation, employment discrimination, and civil fraud.
Using civil trials as a frame of reference is especially
important because the Supreme Court ruling referred to here, Ramos v. Louisiana, pertains only to
state criminal trials. Many states —
including New York, Texas, and California — do not require unanimous verdicts
in civil trials. And courts-martial,
another apt analogue for VMI’s honor court, require only a two-thirds vote,
even in criminal cases.
The analysis in this Post
story is also noteworthy because of how its attitude toward due process in an
honor court hearing compares with what the paper’s editors have suggested about
due process in more serious campus proceedings.
In 2011, the Obama administration instructed universities
to apply an evidentiary standard to sexual assault cases known as preponderance
of evidence, according to which the jury need only believe there is a greater
than 50 percent chance the accused is guilty of the alleged violation.
This standard of proof is the necessary threshold in civil cases; in criminal sexual-assault
trials, however, prosecutors must clear the higher bar of beyond a reasonable
doubt. Last year, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos issued a new
regulation that allows schools to apply a civil case standard of proof
known as clear and convincing evidence, which falls between the
preponderance-of-evidence and beyond-a-reasonable-doubt standards.
You might think, given the critique of VMI’s honor court
proceedings, that the Post’s
editorial team would welcome a higher burden of proof in Title IX cases. After
all, according to a
database maintained by KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College and
coauthor of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack
on Due Process at America’s Universities, students accused of sexual
misconduct have filed more than 550 lawsuits against universities in state and
federal court since 2011.
Not so. This
is what the Post said about
DeVos’s changes earlier this year: “Some changes — such as allowing schools to
apply a higher evidentiary standard for sexual abuse cases than is used for
disciplinary proceedings — seem ill-advised.”
Simply put, while the Post’s
VMI story suggests that criminal standards should apply to honor court hearings
about cheating on an exam, the editorial board would prefer that only the
lowest evidentiary standards apply to charges of sexual assault.
That’s not the only high standard that the paper’s
editors did not want President Trump’s Department of Education to implement.
When DeVos first proposed the regulation, the
paper called “a proposal that would guarantee a person accused of sexual
misconduct the right to cross-examine the accuser” the “most troubling” of the
suggested reforms. It was part of the final rule nonetheless.
There’s one more layer of irony to the story. The Post uses the recent Supreme Court
decision to suggest that VMI’s policy was racist, as “non-unanimous jury
verdicts were rooted in Jim Crow.” Yet journalists
and law
professors have argued that Title IX campus sexual-misconduct
investigations are biased against black male students. Perhaps for that reason,
if not for consistency’s sake, the Post
could see the value of DeVos’s more rigorous standards of evidence.
It is reasonable to want students accused of violating an honor code to receive a fair hearing that follows high standards of due process. But why would we expect that if we’re not providing it to students facing much more serious charges? The new administration should consider that question before it reverts to Obama-era guidance.
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