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Blog and Media Roundup - Friday, December 11, 2015; News Roundup
Topic Started: Dec 11 2015, 04:43 AM (161 Views)
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http://www.cotwa.info/2015/12/bloomington-woman-charged-in-false-rape.html

Thursday, December 10, 2015
Bloomington woman charged in false rape case near IU campus
The Bloomington Police charged the woman who allegedly falsely accused a man of rape we wrote about here. It is important to remember that she is innocent until proven guilty.

It is difficult to ignore that the media did not publish her name. Maybe the cops did not release the name, or maybe Fox 59 knew her name, but decided not to publish it. Whatever the case may be, perhaps this practice should be employed for the presumptively innocent individuals who are accused of sexual assault.

But, if you believe that publishing the name of presumptively innocent individuals accused of sexual assault is necessary to protect society or generate leads, then wouldn't society have an interest in ensuring that men stay away from her in order to avoid a false allegation? Or, perhaps she has previously falsely accused someone who is rotting away in jail who could benefit from knowing her identity.

While I understand the utility in publishing names of the presumptively innocent, there should be consistency.

****UPDATE***** Fox59 published the woman's name, but apparently no picture is available.
Posted by barney greenwald at 9:49 AM
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http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20151209-tony-pederson-why-quentin-tarantinos-pulp-fiction-is-important-for-my-students-to-see.ece

Tony Pederson: Why Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction’ is important for my students to see
By TONY PEDERSON
Published: 09 December 2015 02:16 PM

Like many university professors, I’ve been thinking about the potential for microaggression in my lectures. For the uninitiated, microaggression is part of the current university jargon for subtle but offensive comments or actions, deliberate or not, that reinforce a racial stereotype.

I teach media ethics, and I am thinking about my regular lecture on media violence. Even as a near-absolutist supporter of the First Amendment, I have concerns about the violence that we see in media. In the lecture, I show a violent, profane 20-minute segment from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction that includes frequent use of the N-word.

Why do I show this? Tarantino, in my opinion, is one of the most important film directors of the post-World War II era, and the context of language and violence in his films is important for university students to understand.

Coverage of news events from a number of our universities has created heartfelt soul searching among students, professors and administrators. But the situation at Princeton is troubling: Students there seek to remove the name of former president Woodrow Wilson from a distinguished school of public affairs because his legacy includes segregating the federal work force. Yet he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner and appointed the first Jewish justice to the Supreme Court.

Where would a decision like this lead? Do we take slave-owner Thomas Jefferson’s name off every school, street, bridge and building in the country? Do we scrub the image of George Washington, also a slave owner, from the currency that is a world standard in commerce? What about Franklin D. Roosevelt, who interned more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II?

Many of our historical figures had very real flaws, and democracy is a messy, imperfect, continuing process.

As previously reported, two SMU fraternities that planned a party with a racially insensitive theme canceled it in October after strong criticism from the SMU community. Even though the Wesleyan tradition at SMU has embraced a long and distinguished history of free speech and academic freedom, SMU President R. Gerald Turner was correct to condemn the party as abhorrent. As we have seen too often, fraternity members, especially when fueled by alcohol, can do idiotic things.

Many students of color, especially African-Americans on predominately white campuses, can feel an isolation that hinders academic performance as well as full inclusion into campus life. Despite years of progress on civil rights, this remains a delicate issue, including on the SMU campus.

Yet somehow “comfort” has crept into the national discussion. University students, according to some of the protesters, need to feel comfortable. All students of color need to feel that they belong and have a sense of security in their place as a part of university life. But the discussion, vis-à-vis the microaggressions, seems to include a freedom from ideas that might offend.

Since when did a university education guarantee such comfort? When did challenging a student’s ideas and assumptions vanish from our mission as professors? Have we lost the concept of a truly “liberal” education, in the sense that liberal has nothing to do with politics? I hope not.

Another of my regular lectures includes a discussion of the 2006 Duke lacrosse case — one of the most racially charged incidents on a university campus in my memory. Three white members of the Duke lacrosse team were accused of rape by an African-American dancer hired to perform at a team party.

The party should never have happened, but the players were charged on virtually no credible evidence. The performance of much of the media was reprehensible, with too many reporters buying into the “guilty, of course” narrative put forward by a local district attorney and some professors on the Duke campus. The charges were eventually dismissed and the district attorney disbarred. It took a sensitive and thorough 60 Minutes investigative report by the late Ed Bradley, an African-American, to question assumptions made in the case.

A national narrative that fits a politically correct scenario can be wrong. In the current national narrative on race, let’s address the problems with candor and sincerity. But let’s also safeguard free speech and open intellectual inquiry that are the lifeblood of universities and democracy. The Tarantino and Duke lectures will be on my syllabus next semester.

Tony Pederson is professor and Belo Distinguished Chair in Journalism at SMU. He is formerly the executive editor of The Houston Chronicle. Twitter: @tonypederson
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http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/12/10/fox-news-reporting-truth-about-sex-and-college/

Fox News reporting: The truth about sex and college

Published December 10, 2015

| FoxNews.com

Activists have been saying for some time there's a rape epidemic on college campuses, and a few years ago President Obama's Department of Education decided to do something about it. The department sent a “guidance” letter to schools across America, threatening to withdraw federal funding unless these institutions dealt with sexual assault as the government saw fit.

This led to universities setting up their own court systems, in effect, to deal with what is elsewhere treated as a violent crime. However, unlike actual courts, many procedural safeguards were left out of the equation.

Students were now facing tribunals without the guidance of an attorney, without a chance to confront their accuser, without the ability to introduce relevant evidence and without other traditional elements of due process. In addition, these courts require the lowest standard of proof to find the accused responsible.

"Fox New Reporting: The Truth About Sex & College," premiering this Saturday, 8 p.m. ET, looks at this present-day phenomenon, concentrating on a handful of cases that demonstrate how the system works.

At Occidental College, Fox News looks into the secret record of their “John Doe” case. Two students had sex while intoxicated. Even though the woman did not at first refer to the incident as rape, she changed her mind after talking to a college counselor. “John” found himself brought up on charges of assault and branded the campus rapist. He went through a Kafkaesque proceeding and was kicked out of college, scrambling to find another school that would take him.

Then there's the stranger-than-fiction story of Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia University. She had sexual relations with fellow student Paul Nungesser and, several months later, accused him of rape.” The college investigated and did not find Emma’s story credible. So she started a performance art project she called “Carry that Weight,” for which she dragged around a mattress at all times to call attention to her claim. She became a celebrity, and was even invited to the State Of The Union Address, representing rape victims. Meanwhile, Nungesser received death threats and lived in constant fear for his safety.

At the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Corey Mock was accused of sexual assault and found not responsible. Then, with no new evidence, the school suddenly did an about face and declared Mock was, in fact, responsible, and expelled him. He took his case outside the academic world and into a state court, which overturned the result after finding the school -- in a reversal of normal process -- had improperly required Mock to prove his innocence.

Though the details of these cases are often shocking, they are not necessarily surprising. The systems being set up on campuses are only following what activists have long desired. And advocates are pushing, with some success, for federal and state legislatures to codify much of this process.

So far these advocates have held the moral high ground in this debate, but some are starting to question if they've gone too far. Are colleges setting up star chambers that are more about politics than justice? Are schools even equipped to deal with this issue? And are legislatures rushing in to solve a problem that could use a little more debate?

Fox News asks the tough questions in the special Fox News Reporting: The Truth About Sex & College, anchored by Martha MacCallum. The show it premieres Saturday, Dec. 12 at 8 p.m. ET. It also airs Sunday Dec. 13 at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET.
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http://www.thegazette.com/subject/location/schools/college/university-of-iowa/ui-extends-sex-assault-survey-deadline-after-low-participation-quality-complaints-20151210

UI extends sex assault survey deadline after low participation, quality complaints
Students demand apology for survey's 'abysmal quality'

Vanessa Miller
The Gazette
Dec 10, 2015 at 6:30 pm

IOWA CITY — The 32,000-plus University of Iowa students asked to participate in a first-of-its-kind survey aimed at assessing the issue of sexual violence on campus were given three extra weeks to complete the questionnaire after some complained it contained offensive gaffes.

Instead of a Nov. 20 deadline, students have until the end of Friday.

UI Vice President for Student Life Tom Rocklin said the university added time “to give as many students as possible the opportunity to complete the survey.”

By Nov. 20, about 2,230 students had participated, or roughly 7 percent of those invited to do so beginning Oct. 26. That number increased to 2,560 — about 8 percent — as of Thursday.

“We’ve heard from many students that the survey’s length deterred them from responding,” Rocklin said. “We’ve also had isolated comments about specific aspects of the survey.”

The UI had opted out of one of the most extensive surveys ever done on the issue of sexual violence on campuses, which canvassed about 150,000 students at 27 colleges, including Iowa State University. The survey, conducted by the Association of American Universities, found nationally that more than 20 percent of female undergraduates said they were victims of sexual assault and misconduct this year.

That survey had about a 19 percent overall response rate, although it was much lower on some campuses.

UI officials, expressing concerns about the timeline of the national survey and its completeness, decided to do one of their own that would focus more specially on the UI community.

The survey instrument the UI used is called the Administrator Researcher Campus Climate Collaborative Survey, developed by campus advocates, students, law enforcement and sexual assault researchers who met in Georgia and in Wisconsin for summits on sexual assault and misconduct.

Some students quickly raised concerns.

The survey provides different questions to different students based on their answers to previous questions.

“Students alerted us to two errors in the branching logic, which presented some with a question, or several questions, they should not have received,” Rocklin said. “Each issue was fixed quickly.”

Graduate student Spenser Santos said the errors were offensive and left some feeling re-victimized.

“There were questions of whether you committed acts under the umbrella of sexual assault,” Santos said. “Some people answered, ‘no, no, no,’ and then were given a follow-up question that should have been given only if someone answered in the affirmative.”

Santos said several friends reported experiencing the problem and didn’t finish the survey because of it.

“This was upsetting and triggering to many who experienced the follow-up question identifying them as perpetrators,” Santos said in a letter to UI President Bruce Harreld. “And it is doubly upsetting that no announcement and apology for the error has been made public.”

Santos said the survey was corrected by the time he logged on, but peers who were asked the wrong questions sent messages to administrators, calling the gaffe “unacceptable.”

“My colleagues who are survivors reported seeing it,” he wrote to Harreld. “They expressed shock that anyone could look at this survey and not see how it would trigger survivors in many ways.”

The survey the UI used was provided at no cost and allowed administrators to make changes reflecting the campus. According to a generic copy given to The Gazette, it begins with demographic questions, then moves into modules starting with alcohol use.

Santos said he and some others found the ordering of questions objectionable.

“It sends the message that the university sees the survivor’s behavior patterns with regard to drugs and alcohol as relevant, despite later assurances that sexual assault is not the fault of the victim,” he wrote in his letter.

Santos said the survey seemed focused on relations between students and less so on reports of faculty-student misconduct or cases involving student interactions with non-students.

The UI graduate student union also weighed in, calling problems “numerous.”

“Its overall tone is blaming and dismissive of victims of sexual violence and the extensive line of questioning about the victim’s alcohol and drug history is deeply disturbing,” a union spokeswoman said in a statement.

Rocklin said the university contacted survey developers about the errors and officials will be able to determine which surveys contained questions they should not have so that can be addressed during the analysis.

Results are expected during the spring. semester.
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Quasimodo

Quote:
 
What about Franklin D. Roosevelt, who interned more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II?


Worse than Donald Trump!!! (sarc/off)

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http://blog.simplejustice.us/2015/12/11/the-department-of-educations-next-epidemic/

The Department of Education’s Next Epidemic

Flush with its success at having done what would have been unimaginable a generation ago, having untethered the concept of rape from its definition, eviscerated due process, and rammed its guidance down the throats of academia despite the absence of any lawful authority, outgoing Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has a new dragon to slay.

“Yes, we should have free speech. Yes, we should have diversity of ideas. Yes, we should be encouraging vigorous debate and all kinds of things,” Duncan told Mic. “But when young people don’t feel safe, feel absolutely isolated, feel absolutely intimidated, made to not feel welcome — that’s something else.”

“We have to make sure that kids feel they belong on campus, that they belong in this world,” he said. “And we have some work to do.”

As was accomplished under the guise of gender discrimination, where the nature of sexual interactions morphed from a putative anti-rape attack of “no means no” into an unworkable, meaningless morass of unprovable feelings and excuses under “yes means yes,” the rubric for the next assault on campus will be characterized as ending racial discrimination.

How can anyone be against ending racial discrimination? Why, that would make opponents pro-racial discrimination, and what sane person would take that side?

If the rhetoric sounds familiar, it should. Coming out of secret meetings with students, Duncan oozed his purpose:

“A couple of things hit me,” Duncan said. “One, how much universities are struggling with this and trying to get it right. And two, frankly, just how much pain is out there. Hearing some of these students’ stories here a couple weeks ago was powerful. Hearing some of these university presidents grapple with this stuff was powerful.”

Given how easily we succumb to gushing emotional appeals, few will notice that Duncan’s moving spiel fails to offer any clue what horrible things were done to cause “how much pain is out there.” Have white students taken to burning crosses in front of black students’ dorm rooms, or are these “powerful” stories about how someone called America “the land of opportunity,” a well-known microaggression that can cause sensitive students to lose sleep for days?

Have colleges become hotbeds of racial discrimination? From all outward appearances, racial tolerance and understanding has made enormous strides since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where schools have gone to great lengths to achieve racial diversity, overcoming challenges as far back as Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, and achieving remarkable success in students’ embrace of each other, without regard to race.

So just as real rape was essentially non-existent on campus, and the solution was to redefine it to create an epidemic, the DoE is turning over rocks to look for racial discrimination, and harassment, by calling out the most innocuous, if not absurd, speech and conduct as if it was a lynching.

Aside: Speaking of lynchings, the absurdity (and stupidity) is well demonstrated by demands to rename a building on the campus of Lebanon Valley College because it was named after benefactor and former college president, Dr. Clyde A. Lynch. Look out, Loretta.

Unsurprisingly, the hugely successful playbook from the “rape epidemic” is being reprised for the next epidemic:

In addition to encouraging schools to be responsive to students’ concerns, Duncan mentioned the responsibility of the department’s civil rights division to enforce laws related to discrimination and harassment.

“We still have the enforcement arm of the Office of Civil Rights,” he said. “Since we’ve been here, we’ve had [1,000] complaints of racial harassment on campus. That’s a staggering number. So that part — we have that responsibility.”

In the context of sexual assault, the cries have been about the number of schools “under investigation.” Not determined to have done anything wrong, mind you, but having had a complaint lodged against them with OCR. So here, we have 1000 complaints. Of what, exactly? And their validity? Complaints mean nothing more than accusations, which mean nothing until their specifics are revealed and their validity ascertained.

But then, as Duncan reveals, OCR plans to ramp up its internal adjudication demands, the next “Dear Colleague” letter, where it will sit as judge, juror and executioner of what constitutes racial harassment, and let us know afterward of what a great job it’s doing cleaning up the epidemic of . . . what? Don’t ask. There are students who “feel unsafe,” and it’s their job to fix that. And your job to shut your mind and let them do their job.

And lest you think their efforts to clean up racial harassment will be limited to policing microaggressions, that’s just the start of its micromanagement of higher education:

“One of the big issues or big critiques, which is really fair coming from the students of Missouri and others, is, ‘We want a more diverse faculty,'” Duncan said. “The issue is, the pipeline doesn’t exist. We just don’t have that pipeline.”

“Some of this stuff, we can take action quickly, some of it we need to really step back,” he said. “We desperately need a more diverse faculty. Definitely need a more diverse administration. But we as a nation have not created that pipeline.”

The thrust won’t be limited to silencing speech that doesn’t conform to the demands of the most fragile teacup, and not even to dictating to universities the color of their professors and administrators, but to creating “a pipeline” so that their race-dictated “guidance” will be sustainable going forward. The implications of this benign-sounding scheme are monstrous, where competence and quality of educators will be subject to OCR’s race-focused threats of hire black professors, regardless of competence, or lose funding.

As has happened with rape and sexual assault, questioning and challenging the lies and practice that have turned American campuses into a panacea for female gender-hatred and an arbitrary minefield for male students who have been relegated to disposable fodder, the cries of misogynist, sexist and rape-apologist will be loud and clear. Few are willing to endure these ad hominem attacks. This is the weapon of censorship, and it’s damn effective.

The same will be true for this next epidemic of purported racial harassment, and screams of racist will be ringing out against anyone questioning OCR’s effort to bludgeon reason into submission. And so, time to gird the loins and prepare to suffer the slings and arrows of the terminally progressive. To riff off Edmund Burke, all it takes for insanity to prevail is for sane people to do nothing.

And painful as it may be to endure the next, and far more disturbing, cries of racist, the options are limited. Either call out the absurdity of the DoE’s insanity, and be called a racist for doing so, or stand idly by and let speech, thought, and anything that hurts the feelz of any fragile teacup of any hue be dictated by the powers of government. Here we go again
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http://video.foxnews.com/v/4657074412001/casualties-of-the-war-on-the-accused-in-college-rape-cases/?intcmp=hpvid1#sp=show-clips

Casualties of the war on the accused in college rape cases

Dec. 11, 2015 - 5:28 - Preview: Fox News Reporting: The Truth About Sex & College: Lawyer representing accused male students speaks out
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Dec 11 2015, 03:23 PM
http://video.foxnews.com/v/4657074412001/casualties-of-the-war-on-the-accused-in-college-rape-cases/?intcmp=hpvid1#sp=show-clips

Casualties of the war on the accused in college rape cases

Dec. 11, 2015 - 5:28 - Preview: Fox News Reporting: The Truth About Sex & College: Lawyer representing accused male students speaks out
MUST SEE
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/argument-sexual-assault-race-harvard-law-school?intcid=mod-latest
Today 5:30 pm
Shutting Down Conversations About Rape at Harvard Law
By Jeannie Suk

Nineteen Harvard Law School professors have signed a statement criticizing the documentary “The Hunting Ground” for its portrayal of a sexual-assault case. Credit Photograph by Gretchen Ertl / The New York Times / Redux

This is a piece on a subject about which I may soon be prevented from publishing, depending on how events unfold. Last month, near the time that CNN broadcast the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” which focuses on four women who say their schools neglected their claims of sexual assault, I joined eighteen other Harvard Law School professors in signing a statement that criticized the film’s “unfair and misleading” portrayal of one case from several years ago. A black female law student accused a black male law student of sexually assaulting her and her white female friend. The accuser, Kamilah Willingham, has graduated from the law school and is featured in the film. The accused, Brandon Winston, who spent four years defending himself against charges of sexual misconduct, on campus and in criminal court, was ultimately cleared of sexual misconduct and has been permitted to reënroll. The group that signed the statement, which includes feminist, black, and leftist faculty, wrote that this was a just outcome. (The faculty, of which I’m a member, made the final decision not to dismiss Winston from the law school, after a contrary recommendation made by the school’s administrative board, but I rely only on public knowledge produced by the film and his criminal trial, and don’t draw on any confidential or internal information about the case.)

Winston’s attorneys have put public documents related to his case on a dedicated Web site so that people who see the film can evaluate the facts of the case for themselves. I won’t belabor the merits of the case or the accuracy of the film here, but, as Emily Yoffe noted on Slate, “what the evidence (including Willingham’s own testimony) shows is often dramatically at odds with the account presented in the film.” The evidence reveals that Winston, who was involved in a confused, drunken encounter, was not, as Willingham claims in the film, “a rapist” or “a predator” (Her statement that “he is a rapist” was edited out when the film was broadcast on CNN.) Harvard officials were not indifferent to Willingham’s complaint; Winston was removed from the law school and investigated by the school, an independent fact-finder, and the local district attorney. In e-mails to the lawyer for a white female student, who had accused a black college quarterback of rape and ultimately appeared in the film, one of the producers expressed the filmmakers’ intent to “ambush” him, and explained that “we don’t operate the same way as journalists” since the film is “very much in the corner of advocacy for victims” and had no “need to get the perpetrator’s side.” This raised questions about whether fairness and accuracy are even important for an advocacy film, but the filmmakers have continued to insist that “the truth is on our side.” In a comment to The New Yorker, they wrote, “We fully stand behind Willingham’s account—everything in the film is accurate.” Disagreement is an expected part of the exchange, which, on the whole, helps move the public discussion toward more nuanced perceptions of campus sexual-assault narratives.

But last week the filmmakers did more than understandably disagree with criticism of the film, which has been short-listed for the Academy Award for best documentary. They wrote, in a statement to the Harvard Crimson, that “the very public bias these professors have shown in favor of an assailant contributes to a hostile climate at Harvard Law.” The words “hostile climate” contain a serious claim. At Harvard, sexual harassment is “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including verbal conduct that is “sufficiently persistent, pervasive, or severe” so as to create a “hostile environment.” If, as the filmmakers suggest, the professors’ statement about the film has created a hostile environment at the school, then, under Title IX, the professors should be investigated and potentially disciplined.

To my knowledge, no complaint of sexual harassment has been filed with Harvard’s Title IX office—though I’ve been told by a high-level administrator that several people have inquired about the possibility—and I don’t know if the school would proceed with an investigation. Precedent for such an investigation exists in the case of Laura Kipnis, a feminist film-studies professor at Northwestern University, who earlier this year wrote an article criticizing aspects of Title IX policies and culture and was accused of creating a hostile environment on campus; Northwestern conducted an investigation and ultimately cleared Kipnis of sexual-harassment charges. A handful of students have said that they feel unsafe at Harvard because of the professors’ statement about the film. If a Title IX complaint were filed and an investigation launched, the professors wouldn’t be permitted to speak about it, as that could be considered “retaliation” against those who filed the complaint, which would violate the campus sexual-harassment policy.

What could possibly be the logic on which criticism of “The Hunting Ground” could be said to contribute to a hostile environment, or to cause a student to feel unsafe? The film features the first-person narratives of individuals who describe their sexual assaults and then go on to describe the insensitivity of campus officials or police who did not vindicate their claims. At the Sundance festival première, which I attended, when an audience member asked what people could do to join the fight against campus sexual assault, one of the survivors featured in the film responded, simply, “Believe us.” It is a near-religious teaching among many people today that if you are against sexual assault, then you must always believe individuals who say they have been assaulted. Questioning in a particular instance whether a sexual assault occurred violates that principle. Examining evidence and concluding that a particular accuser is not indeed a survivor, or a particular accused is not an assailant, is a sin that reveals that one is a rape denier, or biased in favor of perpetrators.

This is the set of axioms on which one might build a suggestion that challenging the accuracy of “The Hunting Ground” contributes to a hostile environment on campus. If I am a student at a school where professors seem to disbelieve one accuser’s account, then it is possible that they could disbelieve me if I am assaulted. That possibility makes me feel both that I am unsafe and that my school is a sexually hostile environment. Under this logic, individuals would not feel safe on campus unless they could know that professors are closed off to the possibility that a particular person accused of sexual misconduct may be innocent or wrongly accused. But, then, what would be the purpose of a process in which evidence on multiple sides is evaluated? Fair process for investigating sexual-misconduct cases, for which I, along with many of my colleagues, have fought, in effect violates the tenet that you must always believe the accuser. Fair process must be open to the possibility that either side might turn out to be correct. If the process is not at least open to both possibilities, we might as well put sexual-misconduct cases through no process at all.

The ironclad principle that you must always believe the accuser comes as a corrective to hundreds of years in which rape victims were systematically disbelieved and painted as liars, sluts, or crazies. This history, along with the facts that sexual assault is notoriously underreported and that the crime suffers no more false reports than other crimes—and the related idea that only those actually assaulted would take on the burden of coming forward—leads many advocates today to the “always believe” orthodoxy. We have seen recent high-profile instances in which that article of faith has led to damaging errors, as in Rolling Stone’s reporting of a rape at the University of Virginia, or the prosecution of the Duke lacrosse case. The extent of the damage comes out of the fact that “always believe” unwittingly renders the stakes of each individual case impossibly high, by linking the veracity of any one claim to the veracity of all claims. When the core belief is that accusers never lie, if any one accuser has lied, it brings into question the stability of the entire thought system, rendering uncertain all allegations of sexual assault. But this is neither sensible nor necessary: that a few claims turn out to be false does not mean that all, most, or even many claims are wrongful. The imperative to act as though every accusation must be true—when we all know some number will not be—harms the over-all credibility of sexual assault claims.

Sexual assault is a serious and insidious problem that occurs with intolerable frequency on college campuses and elsewhere. Fighting it entails, among other things, dismantling the historical bias against victims, particularly black victims—and not simply replacing it with the tenet that an accuser must always and unthinkingly be fully believed. It is as important and logically necessary to acknowledge the possibility of wrongful accusations of sexual assault as it is to recognize that most rape claims are true. And if we have learned from the public reckoning with the racial impact of over-criminalization, mass incarceration, and law enforcement bias, we should heed our legacy of bias against black men in rape accusations. The dynamics of racially disproportionate impact affect minority men in the pattern of campus sexual-misconduct accusations, which schools, conveniently, do not track, despite all the campus-climate surveys. Administrators and faculty who routinely work on sexual-misconduct cases, including my colleague Janet Halley, tell me that most of the complaints they see are against minorities, and that is consistent with what I have seen at Harvard. The “always believe” credo will aggravate and hide this context, aided by campus confidentiality norms that make any racial pattern difficult to study and expose. Let’s challenge it. Particularly in this time of student activism around structural and implicit racial bias pervading campuses, examination of the racial impact of Title IX bureaucracy is overdue. We are all fallible—professors, students, and administrators—and disagreement and competing narratives will abound. But equating critique with a hostile environment is neither safe nor helpful for victims. We should be attentive to our history and context, and be open to believing, disbelieving, agreeing, or disagreeing, in individual instances, based on evidence.
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