Many campus activists seem to want anyone accused of sexual assault on a college campus to be removed from society, yet they don’t want to give the students tools to defend their futures.
I briefly touched on this in an article on Tuesday, about proposed legislation that would make it nearly impossible for students found responsible for sexual misconduct to transfer to another school and continue their education. If misconduct hearings are a “learning experience,” as some college administrators have said, then halting a student’s learning seems like a bad way to go.
An obvious comparison would be to disciplinary hearings involving plagiarism, as students can be expelled for that as well, but there are distinct differences. For one, plagiarism is not a crime in broader society. For another, there’s no ambiguity about plagiarism — once the accusation is made, the evidence is either there or it isn’t. It never comes down to a he said/she said situation.
Not so with sexual assault. Schools should not be able claim they are merely adjudicating school policy when they are in fact adjudicating an actual criminal offense. And given that the campus process frequently punishes the accused despite reasonable doubt (many such cases are not prosecuted in criminal court for this reason), it is unreasonable to go beyond expulsion to imposing the death penalty on an accused student’s future educational prospects.
What do campus activists want? One accused student told Buzzfeed what many others have felt: That activists and administrators want them to die.
“At first I thought they didn’t want me to participate in campus activities. Then I thought they didn’t want me to graduate,” the student said. “Now they don’t want me to have a job or be part of society. Do they want me to commit suicide? Is that what they want me to do? What is the endgame?”
It’s a question activists will need to figure out. If they do believe accused students are such a danger to society that they should be cast out, shouldn’t they be in jail? Shouldn’t it be mandatory to take their cases to the civil authorities? How can it possibly be acceptable to expel them so that they can prey on students and nonstudents off campus?
But if disciplinary hearings are indeed learning experiences, then why foreclose a student’s ability to continue learning?
The answer is that activists want the easy way out. They want to throw away due process rights for the accused so that it is easier to find accused students responsible for offenses, and then they also want that student’s life hampered as if he (it’s usually a he) was actually convicted in a court where due process rights are respected.
An expelled student may not be in a literal jail, but when he is unable to continue his education or find a job, the effects are similar. Being a convicted felon makes it difficult to get a job, and being expelled for sexual assault — and having your name plastered all over the Internet for it — definitely has a chilling effect on employment and future education.
This alone should be a reason for due process rights for those accused of crimes on campus. Because sexual assault is a crime, whether it happens on a college campus or not. And it needs to be treated as such.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
