Free Republic

Universities now play cop, prosecutor, judge and jury in campus sexual-assault cases, often without allowing due process rights to the accused. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals last week issued an important rebuke to these Title IX proceedings that ought to become a national standard. Since 2011 more than 300 accused students have sued over Title IX decisions. Doe v. Baum was brought by a former University of Michigan student accused of sexual assault. John Doe and Jane Roe, as the parties are identified, agreed they’d attended a party, had sex and that she vomited in a trash can. A...

Among the great blunders of Jimmy Carter’s presidency was creating a U.S. Department of Education. The federal government has no constitutional role in education and this sprawling bureaucracy has chiefly enabled legions of bureaucrats to impose their misbegotten ideas on how schools and colleges should operate from their perches in Washington, D.C. In recent years, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been the spearhead for “progressive” change. With nothing more than some “Dear Colleague” letters supposedly meant to provide “guidance” to colleges and universities, OCR officials made dramatic changes in the law during the Obama administration. The next...

Given that there are so many legitimate incidents to choose from, why have so many high-profile cases ultimately fallen apart? If you were to ask an average person today to name a prominent story about rape on college campuses, odds are pretty good that among the top four or five replies would be the Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone cover story about Jackie and the University of Virginia, Columbia University "mattress girl" Emma Sulkowicz and one of the stories from "The Hunting Ground." Yet in all of these stories, either the accusations were later shown to be a complete...

Hillary Clinton says all female sexual-assault accusers 'have the right to be believed' but skips over accused child rapist she defended in the 1970s – and what of Bill's 'bimbo eruptions'? Hillary Clinton provoked a fearsome outrage from the political right on Monday with an online video in which she insists Americans should reflexively side with young women on college campuses who accuse male students of sexual assault. 'You have the right to be heard. You have the right to be believed. We're with you,' the Democratic front-runner says in the video, which she addresses 'to every survivor of sexual...

On August 13 Florida League of Women Voters (FLWV) Gun Safety Committee chair Patti Brigham will hold a conference for leaders who oppose arming women and other law-abiding citizens on college campuses for self-defense. Brigham’s conference comes as Florida state senator Greg Evers (R-Baker) and representative Greg Steube (R-Sarasota) prepare to renew their push for women with concealed carry permits to be able to carry guns on college campuses for self-defense. Evers and Stuebe both offered bills that would have allowed women to arm themselves in 2015, and both bills were defeated by opposition from gun control groups geared toward...

RALEIGH The UNC-Chapel Hill wrestling coach who has been a critic of how universities handle sexual assault allegations that do not go through the courts is out of a job. After 12 seasons as head coach of the UNC wrestling program, C.D. Mock was “relieved of his duties” by UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham. “I made the decision that a coaching change was in the best interest of our wrestling program moving forward,” Cunningham said in a prepared statement. “I believe a new head coach will re-energize the program and return it to the level of success I expect from...

The total discrediting of Rolling Stone's story on rape at the University of Virginia has shined a light on one of the least palatable features of American life: the so-called epidemic of rape on campus. Authorities from Barack Obama on down have cited the phony statistic that one in five college women is raped. Phony because it's based on a 2007 survey conducted in two Midwestern schools not of a random sample, but of a small number of self-selected respondents and includes unwanted touching and kissing as "sexual assault." A Department of Justice survey released this month presents a different...

A young woman has reported that De Anza College baseball players sexually assaulted her at a party months before members of the team were accused of raping another woman at the same house. "The sheriff's department is aware of the allegation and will look into it," said Sgt. Ed Wise of the Santa Clara County Sheriff's Department, adding that deputies take rape allegations seriously. The fact that the allegations involve the same house is "frightening," Wise said. Sources close to the investigation say the woman came forward with claims she was raped in December only after sheriff's deputies began checking...