Wesley College has been practicing Queen of Hearts justice: “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”Such is the finding of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which announced this week that the Dover, Delaware, school has been rather jumping the gun when it comes to punishing those accused of sexual misconduct, expelling students without even interviewing them.
In April of last year a student nearing graduation and three others were accused of sexual misconduct. They quickly found themselves kangaroo-courted. They were suspended before the college had even asked them their side of the story. They were not given, before the disciplinary hearing, any of the information from the official “incident report.” Nor were they, the Department of Education found, “provided a full opportunity to provide witnesses and other evidence at the hearing.”
It seems this was how Wesley was in the habit of handling allegations of sexual wrongdoing. The Department of Education went through the school’s case files from 2013-2015 and found Wesley College had failed “to provide procedural safeguards and equitable investigations for other accused students, including several incidents in which the college provided no evidence that accused students were interviewed before receiving interim suspensions, some on the same day.”
This, it turns out, is a violation of Title IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in education. Taking the testimony of students of one sex while not even allowing the testimony of students of a different sex might seem like a textbook case of sex discrimination. But in alleged cases of campus rape, Wesley College has been nothing if not trendy—and the trend has been for schools to show how tough they are on sexual misconduct by tossing out due process.
Remarkably, the Department of Education concluded that, even in cases where sexual abuse is alleged, and even on college campuses, there is such a thing as the rights of the accused and the rule of law. Remarkably, because there are intense social pressures on bureaucrats to give the Queen of Hearts her way: “Off with their heads!” has been the order of the day.
Thus it is to the credit of Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, that in settling the case with Wesley College she emphasized the school’s agreement to “ensure student safety” but to do so “through promoting processes all students can believe in to protect their rights.” It’s a rare case in which the bureaucracy responsible for unleashing the Alice-in-Wonderland sexual harassment climate on campuses got one right.
