Rape Hysteria by Faculty and Administrators, Part 3 / Misandry in Education

Earlier in this series we discussed the vagina monologues, a Feminist university play in which women dress up as vaginas, and where, in the original production, a 13-year-old girl is given drinks by a  24-year-old lesbian until she becomes drunk, has sex with her, and afterward says  “If it was rape, it was a good rape.” This play was performed on college campuses across the west for years with no objection by the academic community. From the magazine The National Review we hear of a much lighter version of the play, with a twist:

College administrators have been enthusiastic supporters of Eve Ensler’s play The Vagina Monologues and schools across the nation celebrate “V-Day” (short for Vagina Day) every year. But when the College Republicans at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island rained on the celebrations of V-Day by inaugurating Penis Day and staging a satire called The Penis Monologues, the official reaction was horror. Two participating students, Monique Stuart and Andy Mainiero, have just received sharp letters of reprimand and have been placed on probation by the Office of Judicial Affairs. 

The costume of the P-Day “mascot” — a friendly looking “penis” named Testaclese, has been confiscated and is under lock and key in the office of the assistant dean of student affairs, John King.
The P-Day satirists are the first to admit that their initiative is tasteless and crude. But they rightly point out that V-Day is far more extreme. They are shocked that the administration has come down hard on their good-natured spoof, when all along it has been completely accommodating to the in-your-face vulgarity of the vagina activists. 

V-Day has now replaced Valentine’s Day on more than 500 college campuses (including Catholic ones). The high point of the day is a performance of Ensler’s raunchy play, which consists of various women talking in graphic, and I mean graphic, terms about their intimate anatomy. The play is poisonously anti-male. Its only romantic scene, if you can call it that, takes place when a 24-year-old woman seduces a young girl (in the original version she was 13 years old, but in a more recent version is played as a 16-year-old.) The woman invites the girl into her car, takes her to her house, plies her with vodka, and seduces her. What might seem like a scene from a public-service kidnapping-prevention video shown to schoolchildren becomes, in Ensler’s play “a kind of heaven.” 

Lollipops. Vagina lollipops.

The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations.

The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America. 

Provost Kavanaugh and Testaclese

“Testaclese” tipped the scales when he approached the university Provost, Edward J. Kavanagh, outside the student union. Apparently taking him/it for a giant mushroom, Provost Kavanagh cheerfully greeted him. But when Testaclese presented him with an honorary award as a campus “Penis Warrior,” the stunned official realized that it was no mushroom. After this incident, which was recorded on videotape, the promoters of P-Day were ordered to cease circulating their flyers and to keep Testaclese off campus grounds. Mindful of how school officers had never once protested any of the antics of Vagina warriors, the P-warriors did not comply. The Testaclese costume was then confiscated and formal charges followed.

It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses. In fact, P-Day at Roger Williams was mild by comparison. Wesleyan College hosted a “C***” workshop; Penn State held a “C***”-fest [both of which were named after crass four-letter names for female genitalia]. At Arizona State, students displayed a 40-foot inflatable plastic vagina. It was not confiscated and no one was ever threatened with probation.

Unhappily, P-Day may be the only effective means of countering V-Day with all its c-fests, graphic lollipops, intrusive questionnaires, outsized effigies of vaginas and its thematic anti-male play. The prospect of public readings from P-Monologues on campuses around the country just might be the reductio ad absurdum that could drive the vagina warriors to the bargaining table. The student activists opposed to V-Day will gladly cancel P-Day the moment the V-warriors abandon their vagina–fests.
But for the short term, college administrators should brace themselves. The rebels at Roger Williams are talking about a Free Testaclese Fund. And word is spreading to other campuses. P-Day and Testaclese will be back next year. And not just in Rhode Island.

Why is it the case among some faculty and administrators that sexual expression is pornographic – and hence crude – only when it is displayed by men? When we covered rape hysteria by students, we discussed the story from the student newspaper Harvard Crimson, in which a few Harvard students built a 9-foot “snow penis” on campus, which was torn down by a Feminist student who equated the erection of the sculpture to the support for rape. But focusing here on faculty and administrators, it is the section featuring a professor that presently concerns us:

The Harvard Snow Penis

Women’s Studies Lecturer Diane L. Rosenfeld, who teaches Women, Violence and the Law this semester, said that the implications of the snow phallus go beyond the legitimacy of the statue’s presence. “The ice sculpture was erected in a public space, one that should be free from menacing reminders of women’s sexual vulnerability,” Rosenfeld wrote in an e-mail yesterday.”

She said the snow penis follows a long line of public phallic symbols, including the Washington Monument and missiles. “Women do not need to be reminded of the power of the symbol of the male genitalia,” Rosenfeld said. “My guess is that they are constantly reminded of it in daily messages.” A discussion about feminist perspectives on the statue, sponsored by the Radcliffe Union of Students, will take place Tuesday night in the Adams House small dining room.

Some questions come to mind: based on what we have seen so far, is it likely that this Feminist perspective will be one that values male and female sexuality equally, or is it more likely to be a perspective that attaches a positive sign to one and a negative sign to the other? If the latter is the case, is it then more likely or less likely that the students will adopt the anti-male attitudes of their professors and join with her in contributing to a hostile learning environment for male students? And if such is the case, could we be making a better use of our academic institutions?

Dr. Christina Hoff-Sommers, a Feminist who disagrees with much of establishment Feminism, tells us in her book Who Stole Feminism of the driving attitudes behind this reform project:

The New Jersey Project for reforming the public schools circulated a document entitled “Feminist Scholarship guidelines.” The first guideline is unexceptionable: “Feminist scholars seek to recover the lost work and thought of women in all areas of human endeavor.”

Sounds good so far. Hoff-Sommers next says, “Feminist scholarship begins with an awareness that much previous scholarship has offered a white, male, Eurocentric, heterosexist, and elite view of ‘reality.’”

Men have all the best jobs! Male privilege!

This is a typical Feminist argument in academia: that scholarship has historically focused on the “greats” in society and history: war generals, presidents, great poets and great artists. In other words, people, ideas, and events who and which are “at the top,” and are the movers and shakers of the world. Their approach sounds benevolent, until you consider the fact that it’s not like they care about the under-representation of men at the bottom of society: the common man who died in the coal mine, or the lowly and unnamed soldier. We will explore more of this vein of thought more fully elsewhere. 

I include such quotes to demonstrate that these so-called scholarly guidelines aim to teach people – usually people who sit on committees and decide what gets published - to recognize how male scholars (allegedly) have traditionally thought, and once they are aware of it, to move away from publishing such material. But problems emerge when Feminist professors begin to stereotype what they believe to be male “ways of knowing,” or as they might instead say, “phallocentric epistemologies.” Dr. Hoff-Sommers goes on to say:

The guidelines elaborate on the attitude toward masculinist scholarship and methods by quoting the Feminist theorist Elizabeth Fee [who says]: “Knowledge was created by an act of aggression – a passive nature had to be interrogated, unclothed, penetrated, and compelled by man to reveal her secrets.” Fee’s resentment and suspicion of male “ways of knowing” follows a path well-trodden by such Feminist thinkers as Mary Ellman, [professor] Catharine MacKinnon, and Sandra Harding, whose views of patriarchal knowledge and science have quickly become central gender feminist doctrine.

Playing on the biblical double meaning of knowing to refer both to intercourse and to cognition, Ellman and MacKinnon claim that men approach nature as rapists approach a woman, taking joy in violating “her,” in “penetrating” her secrets. Feminists, says MacKinnon, have finally realized that for men, “to know has meant to fuck.” In a similar mood, Sandra Harding suggests that Newton’s Principles of Mechanics could just as aptly be called “Newton’s Rape Manual” (page 66).

Why does everything have to be about rape to certain Feminists? One might think that if they actually cared about expanding women’s autonomy, they would recognize that there is enough fear of rape in the world without needing to make it up out of nothing. But this is precisely the opposite of what they do. In the Chapter Five of Who Stole Feminism, Dr. Hoff-Sommers tells us,

Women: A Feminist Perspective is said to be the best-selling women’s studies textbook of all time. The first selection, “Sexual Terrorism” by Carole J. Sheffield, is a good example of how the Feminist classroom can “infuse” anxiety and rage.” Ms. Sheffield describes an “ordinary” event that took place early one evening when she was alone in a Laundromat:

“The Laundromat was brightly lit; and my car was the only one in the lot. Anyone passing by could readily see that I was alone and isolated. Knowing that rape is a crime of opportunity, I became terrified.” Ms. Sheffield left her laundry in the washer and dashed back to her car, sitting in it with the doors locked and the windows up. [Sheffield goes on to say] “When the wash was completed, I dashed in, threw the clothes into the drier, and ran back out to my car. When the clothes were dry, I tossed them recklessly into the basket and hurriedly drove away to fold them in the security of my house. Although I was not victimized in a direct, physical way or by objective or measurable standards, I felt victimized. It was, for me, a terrifying experience.” At home, her terror subsides and turns to anger: “Mostly I was angry at being unfree: a hostage of a culture that, for the most part, encourages violence against females, instructs men in the methodologies of sexual violence, and provides them with ready justification for their violence…following my experience at the Laundromat, I talked with my students about terrorization” (87-88).

If this event had occurred late at night – say, after dark – it would be understandable to possess a reasonable fear of being out alone – regardless as to whether one is female or male. But the timeframe of this event is “early one evening,” before dark. There is a fine line between prudence and paranoia, and by the time of day we are able to reasonably infer that she is crossing it. And more: she is teaching her students to see the imminent threat of rape everywhere. There are some people who are so strongly bound in the clutches of their self-imposed fears that they lack the ability to perform basic functions during normal daytime hours. What is often missed in such an approach is that we cannot empower women by teaching them to limit their autonomy by pretending they are always in danger of victimization when they are not. And we cannot build respect between both sexes by teaching one sex the irrational fear of the other.

Heterophobia

Daphne Patai and Norette Koertge, two former women’s studies professors, interviewed women’s studies students and recorded their perspectives in their book Professing Feminism. Here is one student’s experiences, which deserves to be quoted at length:

“Caroline, a social worker in her mid-twenties, says that the one Women’s Studies course she took at a private women’s college was more than enough. Caroline deplores ‘this ongoing knee-jerk reverse sexism which everyone tolerated and encouraged.” She later says, “The course was Introduction to Women’s Studies. I was a senior, and I was, I think, pretty confident by that time, and I remember clashing with the professor very quickly…In the class I took, the answer was always ‘men.’ Whatever the question was, the answer was ‘men.’ It could be, ‘What style of architecture is that?’ And the answer is, ‘Men’s architecture.’ Or, ‘Who contributes to all the violence in the world?’ ‘Men.’ ‘Who’s responsible for everything we endure?’ ‘Men.’

“I was involved with a man at the time, and I thought that he didn’t fit their categories of what men were like. And I also saw him as having been pressed into stereotypes of his own. When he’d been in high school, he took up computers. He’d been very nonathletic, hated team sports, wanted to read, wanted to fuss with his computers. And he was called a nerd and hassled constantly over this and abused in various ways.

And I felt like I really identified with that – I hadn’t been all that feminine in high school. I wore a black leather jacket, hung out with the guys, and people had made fun of me. I hadn’t been desirable as a woman; he hadn’t been desirable as a man…so I guess I was interested in a more global analysis, like: What is it in our society that creates some of these tensions? What is it that we’re doing to ourselves here? I’m not saying I wanted the whole course to be about this, but these questions weren’t acceptable at all, and I felt the professor responded really aggressively to me.

“The time that it really sort of came to a head was when we were talking about rape: ‘Rape – the act of violence that men do to women, that men do to women because they want to keep them down.’ And we got all these reasons why men rape women. And I thought, well, there’s this act of violence of men against women, and why don’t we explore a little bit why people are so frustrated and so violent and so angry that they do these things? And why don’t we take into consideration that men get raped too?

I had a friend in high school, a man, who was raped by a bunch of other men his age, and when I tried to enter this information, it was met with a stone wall: ‘Those statistics are insignificant compared with how many women are raped.’ And I thought, Well, how many men are reporting it? And why are you discounting what I’m trying to share here, which would be adding to the picture?

And I don’t remember the comment the professor made, but it was very condescending, to the effect: ‘Are you saying that rapists are just poor misunderstood people who should be patted on the back and sent out?’ And I’m thinking: You miserable bitch! You know, she was really like ‘Let me humiliate you in front of everyone,’ because of course, that was not what I was saying!

“I have friends who’ve been raped; it’s not like some far-away thing to me. It’s something to get really angry about and be upset about, but something to search for a better solution to than castration! But the only solution the professor was getting at was that men are the problem and without men there’d be a solution. There was no talk of real solutions (82-84).

A poster at UCLA

When discussing rape hysteria by students, we covered numerous demonstrations by primarily Feminist students, the attitudes of which were pervasively one of spite and hostility toward men and boys. At the end of those videos questions that are worth asking again: does this approach work toward helping victims of rape, or encourage others to work toward helping victims of rape? And if it is not about helping victims of rape, what is it really about? 

Freshman orientation at 60 colleges

And now that we are knee-deep in discussing rape hysteria by faculty and administrators, the time has come to ask the question: where are these students who we discussed in our earlier videos getting their anti-male attitudes? Are these students just randomly and out of the blue waking up one day with an attitude of hostility toward men and boys, or is that attitude being taught? We will continue to explore these questions in our next video in this series.

The War on Male Students - Introduction

Education is a core issue for men and boys, and can be categorized into three main areas: educational attainment, misandry, and civil rights. All three are severely entrenched problems.

Educational Attainment

Graduation data from the National Center for Education Statistics demonstrates that the graduation rates of men and boys are on a steep decline with no end in sight:

As educational attainment among male students has declined over the last 40 years, the requirement of postsecondary education in the workforce has radically increased. The chart to the right is an excerpt from a presentation by Judith Loredo, Assistant Commissioner for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board, at the 2012 Project MALES Symposium at UT Austin:

Also, men and boys in education:

Commit 80% of suicides (overall). College men ages of 18-24 commit suicide at six times the rate of women. Sources here and here.

Are twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and 80% of those put on Ritalin (lower ed). Sources here and here

Are 75% of students diagnosed with learning disabilities. Source here.

Are 33% more likely than girls to drop out of high school. Source: Peg Tyre, “The Trouble with Boys.” Newsweek, January 30, 2006. Data cited from U.S. Department of Education.

Are much less likely to participate in student government, academic clubs, music, the performing arts, and student clubs. Source here.

Are suspended twice as often and expelled three times as often as girls (lower ed). Source here.

By age 12, boys are 60% more likely to have repeated at least one grade. Source: Peg Tyre, “The Trouble with Boys.” Newsweek, January 30, 2006. Data from U.S. Department of Education.

Receive the majority of Ds and Fs and the minority of As (lower ed). Source: Dr. Michael Gurian and Kathy Stevens, The Minds Of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005.

These gender inequities are apparent across the lines of race and class, but tend to be more severe among male students of color.

The gap between male and female students in literacy skills is six times the gender gap in math skills (where boys are ahead). Source: Educational Testing Services (ETS) Gender Study, “Trends by Subject, Fourth through Twelfth Grades,” Figure 2-1. Cited in Misreading Masculinity by Thomas Newkirk, p. 35.

The number of boys who said they did not like school rose 71% between 1980 and 2001. Source: University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, Monitoring the Future Study, 1980 to 2001. Cited in National Center for Education Statistics, Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women: 2004, p. 45, Figure 13: “How do you feel about school?”

 Misandry

Misandry is sexism against men and boys. It can be expressed in a myriad of ways. For a detailed and extensive definition, please see the page on misandry. Here are two examples: 

When two young men were exonerated after being falsely accused of date rape at Vassar College, the Assistant Dean of Students Catherine Comins said: "Men who are falsely accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience. They have a lot of pain, but it is not a pain that I would necessarily have spared them. I think it ideally initiates a process of self-exploration. 'How do I see women?' 'If I didn't violate her, could I have?' 'Do I have the potential to do to her what they say I did?' Those are good questions."

 

Here is a poster that for years was hung on the window of the Women's Resource Center at the University of Ottawa in Canada (source here):

 

Civil Rights

The most pervasive civil rights violations in schools today are free speech and due process violations.  This is especially true for men and boys accused of sexual misconduct. For examples, see blog posts and videos (below) on The April 4th Directive (higher education) and Sexual Harassment Hysteria in Lower Education.

 

 

More on this page will be added in the future.

The April 4th Directive - the Death of Due Process for Male Students

*My video has kindly been linked to by Stop Abusive and Violent Environments here (and edited and embedded in their webpage on the right). Thank you to the team at SAVE!*

The greatest threat to the civil rights of male students in higher education is the April 4^th Directive, sometimes called the “Dear Colleague” letter, issued in 2011 by the federal Department of Education's Office on Civil Rights, which I will abbreviate from here on as the OCR. In part 1 of this subseries on the April 4^th directive, I’m going to tell you what parts of the directive are bad for male students, and discuss its reception.

It’s important to remember that there are many policies and customs within academia that serve to disenfranchise and punish male students for the crime of being born male. I’ll be discussing them in more depth in the future.  But this April 4^th Directive - the crown jewel of anti-male policy in higher education – is so indifferent to the well-being of male students, and so broad in its influence, that it deserves to be addressed on in depth and on its own.

In theory, the intention of the directive is to compel academic administrations to render judgments in allegations of sexual misconduct on campus. In practice, it does so in a way that cuts deeply into the rights of the accused, who are almost exclusively male. The most egregious part of this Directive is that it requires all colleges and universities which receive federal funding (in other words, almost all of them) to adopt the Preponderance of Evidence standard when determining whether a male student accused of sexual assault is guilty.

Page 10 of the directive says: “In addressing complaints filed with OCR under Title IX, OCR reviews a school’s procedures to determine whether the school is using a preponderance of the evidence standard to evaluate complaint.” The next page reads “In order for a school’s grievance procedures to be consistent with Title IX standards, the school must use a preponderance of the evidence standard...the “clear and convincing” standard…currently used by some schools, is a higher standard of proof. Grievance procedures that use this higher standard are inconsistent with the standard of proof established for violations of the civil rights laws, and are thus not equitable under Title IX. Therefore, preponderance of the evidence is the appropriate standard for investigating allegations of sexual harassment or violence.”

What is the preponderance standard? To put it in context, the highest standard of proof would be the “Beyond a reasonable doubt” standard, or ~95% certainty that the alleged crime occurred - the standard normally used in criminal trials. A lower standard would be the “clear and convincing” standard: ~80% certain that a crime occurred, or “it is highly probable or reasonably certain that a crime occurred.” The lowest standard before completely reversing the presumption of innocence is the “preponderance of evidence” standard, or 50.01% certainty that a crime occurred. In other words, the toss of a coin. This is the standard used to determine guilt for misdemeanors like traffic fines and parking tickets, and now this incredibly low standard is used to determine whether male students are guilty of felony offenses. It is my belief, and the belief of many others, that this demand placed upon colleges and universities by the OCR is unethical. Unethical and unconscionable, on the grounds that it such shows extreme disregard for the rights of the accused, and demonstrates either an ignorance or an extreme indifference to the suffering experienced by those falsely accused of sexual assault.

Teri Stoddard is the program director for Stop Abusive andViolent Environments, or SAVE, an organization that speaks on behalf of the falsely accused. On their website she states: “Campus procedures are not criminal ones, so the accused do not enjoy Constitutional protections. Now, jilted lovers can ruin the lives of teachers and students with false allegations of rape.” And she’s right. Trials conducted in academia are not like criminal trials conducted with lawyers, judges, rules of evidence, and thorough means of documentation, like court recorders. In academia, the accused are not afforded the right to cross-examine their accusers before judgments are entered against them, as they would in a trial. Page 12 of the directive states: “OCR strongly discourages schools from allowing the parties to question or cross-examine each other during the hearing.”

Hans Bader is a former attorney for the Department of Education. In his article “Why Cross-Examination Rights Matter inCampus Sexual Harassment Cases under Title IX,” he writes of the OCR’s statement forbidding cross-examination during the hearings, “This is perverse, since the subjective nature of the legal definition of harassment means that there is no category of cases in which cross-examination is more useful or essential to ensure due process.

“Sexual harassment cases commonly turn not only on such credibility disputes, but also on the complainant’s alleged subjective emotional state, which makes cross-examination far more essential than in the ordinary campus discipline case. (By contrast, other kinds of disciplinary cases often turn solely on objective events that can be verified without any cross-examination of the accusing witness).

“Even if it did not violate the Constitution, the Department of Education’s assault on cross-examination would still be unjustified, since cross-examination has justly been called "the most powerful engine for the discovery of truth ever devised.” In sexual harassment cases brought in court, the defendant invariably has the opportunity to cross-examine the accuser, because courts recognize that cross-examination is useful in exposing false allegations."

Under this directive, students accused of sexual misconduct are also no longer given due process protections from double jeopardy, a false accuser may try her case, along with all its other attendant violations of due process, a second, and even a third time, until a judgment is entered against the man falsely accused. Page 12 of the directive states, “OCR also recommends that schools provide an appeals process. If a school provides for appeal of the findings or remedy, it must do so for both parties.”

An article was published in the Chronicle for Higher Education in June 2011, the title of which reads “In making campuses safer forwomen, a travesty of justice for men.” The author, Professor Christina Hoff Sommers, informs us, “Marching under the banner of Title IX and freed of high standards of proof, campus disciplinary committees, once relatively weak and feckless, will be transformed into powerful instruments of gender justice. At least, that is the fantasy. But here is the reality: Campus disciplinary committees—often a casual mix of professors, students, and an assistant dean or two—are well suited to resolving cases involving purported plagiarism and cheating, and violations of college rules on drugs and alcohol. But no one considers them prepared to adjudicate murder, arson, kidnapping cases, or criminal assault. They lack the training and the resources to investigate and adjudicate felonies."

Sexual assault, and false accusations of sexual assault, are among the most nebulous crimes in existence. Most cases are he simply said/she said, with no physical evidence, and where we cannot tell if either party is embellishing, lying, telling the whole truth, or hiding half of it. The definitions of what constitutes rape change from person to person, making one person’s rape another’s false accusation. They are also among of the most politicized crimes in our jurisprudence. In other words, sexual assault, and false accusations of the same, are crimes that academia should not be adjudicating if they can help it, and should instead deferring to law enforcement, who are more properly trained than university administrations.

Unfortunately, that’s where the second most harmful part of the April 4^th Directive both ties and forces the hands of academic officials. Previously, colleges and universities tended to conduct mediation and let the police handle weighty felony decisions. No longer. Page 3 of the directive reads, “The school’s Title IX investigation is different from any law enforcement investigation, and a law enforcement investigation does not relieve the school of its independent Title IX obligation to investigate the conduct.”

So what happens when police, investigators, and courts use a higher standard of evidence than academia, when their investigations are mostly conducted separately, and when the academy feels obligated to render judgments on felony offenses with bureaucrats whose areas of expertise is presiding over cases of plagiarism and underage drinking? At times, they will come to completely different conclusions, and one of them, usually the academy, will end up looking foolish. An article in the online publication Townhall titled “The Rape of Caleb Warner” reads:

“At the University of North Dakota (UND) the unthinkable has become a reality. A student has been found guilty of sexual assault despite the fact that local police refused to charge him with a crime – any crime. In fact, the police have charged his accuser with lying about the very incident that led to his campus conviction. And the punishment is not insignificant. Former student Caleb Warner has been banned by UND from setting foot on any North Dakota public campus for three years. Meanwhile, his accuser has been wanted by the Sheriff's Department on the charge of making a false report.

“The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, has been the national leader of the opposition to a federal Department of Education mandate, which is forcing more universities to adopt the preponderance of evidence standard in rape cases. Under this mandate, universities cannot receive federal funding, including financial aid for students, unless they adopt the lower standard of proof in rape cases. FIRE predicted it would result in more wrongful convictions. And FIRE was right.”

FIRE is an organization dedicated to protecting the rights of free speech and due process in higher education. Since it primarily exists to protect students from abuses of academic authority, it is in the best interest of students that they become familiar with the organization and its website. More on FIRE later.

The next interesting part of the directive is on page 5: “In cases involving potential criminal conduct, school personnel must determine, consistent with State and local law, whether appropriate law enforcement or other authorities should be notified.”

The accuser doesn’t have to make a formal claim to law enforcement at all. And the implications are significant. It is entirely possible that a male student may be falsely accused and banned from his school without any pretense of due process, without his accuser ever having brought her claim law enforcement, where he might be exonerated. What would have happened if Caleb Warner’s false accuser had never made a formal claim, and had instead relied solely her hangmen in Judicial Affairs? Caleb Warner would never have been exonerated, either in his local community or in the national press, as he is now, and the full weight of that accusation would hang over his head for the rest of his life.

The fifth amendment right of citizens to  not falsely incriminate themselves, which includes their  right to remain silent, and to not testify against themselves, is an often overlooked and misunderstood element of our jurisprudence. The reason for its existence is that unscrupulous and/or politically-motivated prosecutors and police can cherry-pick, twist, embellish, and flat-out lie about what the accused says. Consider this lecture on exercising your right to remain silent by James Duane, former defense attorney and professor at Regent Law School.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8z7NC5sgik

As we can see, it is important that those accused are aware of their right not to falsely incriminate themselves, and to instead remain silent. Consider the implications if a falsely accused student had made similar statement during a university investigation. If the school conducts its investigation before the police conduct theirs, the falsely accused student, while he conversing with academic officials in a supposedly private interview, may not understand, while he is lulled into a false sense of security, that everything he says can be twisted into lies and used against him in court.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education says, in its “Guide to Due Process and Fair Procedure on Campus,” "If you have both a university disciplinary hearing and a criminal trial pending, you will almost always want to get your disciplinary hearing postponed until after the criminal matter is settled.  Holding the disciplinary hearing before the criminal trial can be very dangerous, because what you say at the campus hearing-where you have far fewer protections than in a court of law - can be used against you in the criminal case."

But on page 10, the April 4^th directive states, “Schools should not wait for the conclusion of a criminal investigation or criminal proceeding to begin their own Title IX investigation and, if needed, must take immediate steps to protect the student in the educational setting. For example, a school should not delay conducting its own investigation or taking steps to protect the complainant because it wants to see whether the alleged perpetrator will be found guilty of a crime.”

To their credit, while police may sometimes resort to unscrupulous tactics, they often have the decency to inform the accused upfront that anything they say can be used against them in a criminal trial, and that they have the right to remain silent to avoid falsely incriminating themselves. Academia, unfortunately, does not yet possess this integrity.

Other parts of the directive are not unethical per se, but are problematic in that they ignore the suffering of the falsely accused, and fail to advise academia on how to best protect them. On page 5 the directive says, “The school also should tell the complainant that Title IX prohibits retaliation, and that school officials will not only take steps to prevent retaliation but also take strong responsive action if it occurs.” Nowhere in the 19 pages of this directive does it mention protecting the accused from retaliation or from those who create a hostile environment toward them. The article in the Chronicle of Higher Education reads:

“In 2006 three Duke University lacrosse players were falsely accused of gang rape. They endured a nightmarish, yearlong ordeal in which abundant evidence of their innocence seemed not to matter at all—not to the police, not to the prosecutor, not to Duke's faculty or president. Protesters gathered outside the lacrosse house carrying a banner with the word CASTRATE, banging pots and pans, and chanting "Confess, confess!" Student vigilantes plastered the campus with "Wanted" posters bearing the players' photographs. Duke professors took out an ad in a local newspaper in support of the pot bangers and poster wielders. After living under suspicion for months, the players were ultimately exonerated by prosecutors, who dropped all charges.”

Men and boys who are falsely accused of sex crimes are sometimes subject to brutal and fatal vigilante attacks. What “strong responsive action” will customs and policies will require universities to take steps to protect male students from such attacks? The answer, of course, is none.

So to summarize what is bad about the April 4th directive:

• Lowers standard of evidence to the unethically low “preponderance” standard
• Denies the accused party the due process rights to cross-examine accusers
• Violates constitutional due process protections from double-jeopardy
• Infringes upon student’s 5^th amendment right to not falsely incriminate themselves
• Investigates independently from, rather than deferring to, professionals in law enforcement
• Fails to protect falsely accused students from retaliation

 The April 4^th Directive represents an unethical and systemic attack on the civil rights of male students. It is ironic and disconcerting that a department which calls itself the Office of Civil Rights would overlook these rights, which are widely regarded as fundamental elements of our jurisprudence, and for good reason.

Students for Liberty is a student community dedicated to broadening the discourse on freedom of speech and due process on college campuses. In their article More Likely Than Not: The Office of Civil Rights’ Encroachment on Due Process, author David Deerson states,

“Obviously, this is an extremely controversial issue.  Sexual assault, particularly rape, is among the most heinous of crimes, and too often attitudes about what constitutes consent are insufficient. But this is not about what constitutes actual sexual assault.  This is about the natural and constitutional rights to due process. It doesn’t take James Madison to see why 50.0001% is not enough evidence to justify ruining someone’s life.”

This is not about being on the left or the right. This isn’t about being black or white, or gay or straight, or even male or female. This is about whether or not those accused of felony offenses, the conviction of which destroys reputations, careers, relationships, and often their lives, should be judged by the same standard of evidence used for traffic fines and parking tickets.

Please help raise awareness about this important issue by spreading the word about the unethical and destructive nature of the April 4^th Directive. To learn more, visit at websites like AccusingU.org, a division of Stop Abusive and Violent Environments. Take a tour of the world’s leading blog dedicated to giving a voice to victims of false accusations: The Community of the Wrongly Accused. Or browse the work of tenacious defender of due process on college campuses at thefire.org.

Our young men are mostly unaware that as soon as they set foot on campus, their universities are effectively holding a gun to their heads. Now more than ever, they need our help.

Who among us will speak in their defense?