Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Reason #5573 That Trump Was Elected

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Education (DOE) pushed the "rape culture" narrative — that one quarter of women would be raped or sexually assaulted on college campuses, and that colleges could not trust the police to handle these crimes. This created a perverse system of campus tribunals which denied due process rights to (mostly) men accused of sexual assault.

On Friday, The New York Times reported on an internal memo published by Propublica showing the Trump administration's first steps in overhauling this "sex bureaucracy." The Times interpreted the move as "scaling back investigations into civil rights violations at the nation's public schools and universities."

The memo, written by Candice Jackson, the acting head of the DOE's Office of Civil Rights (OCR), reversed one part of the Obama administration's campus sexual assault policies, but it is an important first step in reforming the system. Under Obama, OCR investigated colleges when women accusers claimed the colleges were too lax on the men they accused of sexual assault.

"Whenever they had an allegation by some student that her Title IX rights had been violated by a college, they would not only look into the particulars of her complaint and fault the college for not giving her what she wanted, but they would launch a systematic investigation going back for years," Stuart Taylor, co-author of the book The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America's Universities, told PJ Media.
As Ace notes, it's not a panacea:
However, this move is a little bit on the tepid side-- while the new memo will de-escalate the Obama-era Pressure on colleges to create "sex bureaucracies" and extra-constitutional kangaroo courts, it will not affirmatively roll them back -- just take away the pressure for colleges to create and perpetuate this bizarre system.

Given that colleges want to do this crap, more will be necessary.

Though, it should be said, with the federal government no longer mandating the sex bureaucracy, colleges will find themselves more exposed to lawsuits prosecuted by the victims of the sex bureaucracies.
It appears that the current memo has not dealt with the due process problems with the Obama legacy; the fact that accused are rarely allowed to present a defense, and that guilt usually judged on a "preponderance of evidence" standard, not a high bar when no defense is allowed.

But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

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