The Campus Rape Frenzy by KC Johnson

Author:KC Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594038860
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2016-12-26T05:00:00+00:00

8

THE WITCH HUNT INTENSIFIES

When Catherine Lhamon replaced Russlynn Ali as head of the Education Department’s OCR in 2013, whatever hope existed that she might slow the evisceration of due process for accused students quickly vanished. Her response to a challenge from widely respected senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee) in a June 2014 oversight hearing provided a taste of her approach.

“What you’re doing is writing out detailed guidance for 22 million students on 7,200 campuses, and it’s just—it could be your whim, your idea,” the Tennessee Republican admonished Lhamon. Holding up a fat file of marching orders issued by OCR to thousands of universities, the former secretary of education added: “We make the law. You don’t make the law.”

At another point, Alexander asked: “Who gave you the authority” to rewrite Title IX through guidance documents? “Well, with gratitude, you did, when I was confirmed,” shot back Lhamon.1 She thereby suggested that Senate confirmation gave her quasi-dictatorial powers over universities. Or perhaps that the Dear Colleague letter’s regulatory commands had been lurking undetected, from 1972 until 2011, between the lines of Title IX’s simple ban on sex discrimination.2 Lhamon had displayed similar disinterest in listening to advocates of due process by rebuffing, as not “useful,” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff’s request for a meeting when she took office in 2013.3

Lhamon’s disdain for reasoned disagreements with her actions reflected the attitude of her superiors. In 2013, White House staffers invited five law professors—from Harvard, Penn, Cornell, and the University of Chicago—to discuss the administration’s handling of campus sexual assault. According to Geoffrey Stone, the University of Chicago professor, all five expressed concern about the Obama administration’s degrading of due process and the inherent unfairness of the procedures it was pressuring universities to use. Asked in a subsequent interview whether the White House staffers appeared to take this concern seriously, Stone replied: “Not really. . . . [T]hey gave us the full opportunity to express our concerns, but they did not really engage them in the way I would have expected in the meeting. The absence of any substantive feedback after the fact left me with the sense that it was at best a fact-finding meeting and was at worst, ‘OK, we’ll check that off. We did that.’”4

The Obama administration ignored not only the reasoned advice of friends such as Stone but also growing criticisms by other defenders of civil liberties, from the ideological left, right, and center.

In February 2015, U.S. Civil Rights Commission members Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow questioned OCR’s request for a 31 percent budget increase, to $131 million. The nominal justification was a six-fold increase in Title IX complaints, from 391 in 2010—the year before OCR’s crusade began in earnest—to 2,354 in 2014, though Catherine Lhamon let slip the phoniness of the 2014 number by telling The Washington Post that two people, whose identities OCR refused to release, had filed more than 1,700 of those 2,354 Title IX complaints.5 Citing “a disturbing pattern of disregard for the rule of law at OCR,”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.