A Tale Of Two Accusations: Due Process In College Cheating Vs. Campus Sexual Assault Allegations

For at least a decade, media outlets have willfully discarded the Constitutional right to due process for college students accused of sexual assault. The New York Times has been one of the leading outlets for this kind of advocacy, often appearing to disregard due process for those accused of a heinous crime while sticking up for the due process rights of students accused of cheating.

This disconnect was shown earlier this year, when the Times wrote about an online cheating debacle at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine. It’s a good article, taking apart Dartmouth’s attempts to accuse medical students of cheating based on monitoring their online activity during remote tests. The Times noted that the software used to accuse the students was inaccurate, as it was not designed as a forensic tool and could log activity data even when a student wasn’t actually using a device.

For example, since the program was actually used by professors to post assignments and for students to submit their homework, a student might have several tabs open at once, but not actually switch between them.

The Times lamented the lack of due process the accused students were given, writing, “They said they had less than 48 hours to respond to the charges, were not provided complete data logs for the exams, were advised to plead guilty though they denied cheating or were given just two minutes to make their case in online hearings, according to six of the students and a review of documents.”

Of course it is horrifying to learn that accused students aren’t being treated fairly, but the Times doesn’t extend this courtesy to all accused students.

In December 2016, while schools across the country were facing hundreds of lawsuits from students accused of sexual assault who did not receive their Constitutional due process rights, the Times lamented the fact that Stanford provided accused students even minimal fairness. When it comes to allegations of sexual assault, the Times automatically takes the side of accusers, no matter the evidence.

In an article about an allegation at Stanford University, the Times clearly felt the Ivy League institution was in the wrong for requiring an accused student facing expulsion to receive a nearly unanimous guilty finding before being punished. In this particular football player’s case, a majority of five panelists determining the student’s guilt found him responsible, but Stanford required a higher bar for expulsion. The student faced two panels of five to determine his fate, and each time, three found him responsible – meaning two were unconvinced. Stanford at the time required four of the five panelists to find the student responsible before expulsion.

While not exactly a unanimous jury requirement, the implication was clear: The school needed to be pretty damn sure the student had actually committed the assault before administering the ultimate punishment of expulsion.

Stanford that year changed its policy to require a unanimous consent from a three-member panel, which the Times framed in terms of criticism from pro-accuser activists in a piece with the loaded title “Most say it’s rape. But for Stanford, that’s not enough“:

Still, very few sexual assault cases that have gone through the university’s internal process in recent years have led to any significant punishment for the accused, a fact that Stanford attributes to a rigorous but fair standard to guard against wrongful judgments. Advocates for sexual assault survivors consider it a sign of a system stacked against victims.

A New York Times examination of the Stanford case concerning the football player, based in part on a review of more than 100 pages of documents from Stanford’s proceedings, illuminates the school’s struggles and pitfalls in adjudicating these kinds of cases.

The Stanford case followed the typical campus allegation: A male and female student meet at a party while drinking, return to a dorm room and have sex. The man says it was consensual, the woman calls it rape, usually saying she was too drunk to consent. Schools in these situations ignore whether the man was too drunk to consent, taking the woman at her word and disregarding the accused student’s ability to consent.

The Times also highlighted the fact that the accused student was able to remain on the football team even though he had been accused. He hadn’t been charged with a crime, nor was he found responsible by enough panel members to warrant punishment.

The Times is only slightly more centrist when writing straight news articles about federal Title IX rules, though it is apparent the outlet views cross-examination and court-like hearings as anathema to justice, but only in cases of campus sexual assault. The Times has also repeated the faulty “one-in-five” statistic, without examining how it, like the online activity monitoring system used by Dartmouth, is inaccurate. The same goes with the claim that only 2% of rape allegations are false.

At some point as a society we need to really think about the role schools play in such allegations. They are not law enforcement or investigators. They are poorly trained, with built-in biases that repeatedly make them disregard evidence that points to a false allegation in order to avoid outlets like the Times suggesting their school doesn’t care about victims (victims, to the Times, are almost always female accusers).

Outlets like the Times and others repeatedly insist that a crime as serious as rape and sexual assault can be handled by campus administrators, and that attempts to make the process more fair (by providing basic due process rights to those accused of the heinous crime) is tantamount to disbelieving accusers or causing them harm. By that logic, the entire criminal justice system is wrong to provide due process for those accused of crimes.

Of course, the Times sings a different tune whenever someone has been wrongfully convicted in the actual legal system – or when the thing students are being accused of is anything other than sexual assault.

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

The Daily Wire is one of America’s fastest-growing conservative media companies and counter-cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. Get inside access to The Daily Wire by becoming a member.


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