What’s wrong with free speech? What’s wrong with due process of law? Those are fair questions for Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., who has questioned the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be education secretary because she and her husband have given $10,000 to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (Disclosure: I’ve contributed to FIRE, in smaller amounts) Casey charged that FIRE seeks to make it “more difficult for campus sexual assault victims to receive justice.” That’s a reference to the “guidance” delivered by the Obama Education Department in 2011 which, as my then-Washington Examiner colleague Ashe Schow had written, “broadened the definition of harassment, required schools to use a lower standard of proof when determining the credibility of sexual assault accusations and backed it all up with the threat of investigations and a loss of federal funding. It placed a significant burden on schools to use their funds to set up pseudo-court systems to try accused students (and find them responsible or else face an investigation).”
This guidance was based on a fraudulent study which claimed, preposterously, that one in four college women is sexually assaulted, and the kangaroo courts set up do not give accused students rights to legal representation, knowledge of the charges against them or confrontation of witnesses. They specifically rule out requiring, as criminal trials for sexual assault do, proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but only a preponderance of evidence. Schow has relentlessly documented the work of these kangaroo courts — and the lawsuits that aggrieved students have brought against the colleges and universities involved.
I suspect that Senator Casey is unaware of the facts and the ramifications of the policies for which he condemns FIRE (which is headquartered in his home state, in Philadelphia) and the DeVoses. Its mission, proclaimed on its website’s home page, is to “defend and sustain individual rights at America’s colleges and universities. These rights include freedom of speech, legal equality, due process, religious liberty and sanctity of conscience.”
Which of these does Senator Casey want to see not defended? Certainly not, I think, freedom of speech. He is particularly familiar with the cultural left’s attempts to suppress the speech it disagrees with, since the time when his father, Bob Casey Sr., then Governor of Pennsylvania, was blocked from speaking at the 1992 Democratic National Convention because of his opposition to abortion. I remember ascending, with the late columnist Robert Novak, up to the bleachers where Governor Casey and the Pennsylvania delegation were seated; I made a weak joke about the air getting thinner at that altitude. Senator Casey, who like his father opposes abortion, has been treated more generously at later Democratic gatherings, and perhaps he is unaware of how often the freedom of speech of students, mostly conservative but also some on the left, is suppressed by campus operatives. Fortunately, FIRE has been successful in spotlighting these abuses and reducing the number of speech codes which infringe students’ rights. Senator Casey may have other reasons to oppose the nomination of Betsy DeVos. But his family’s experience with speech suppression suggests that her support of FIRE should not be one of them.
