from Hacker News

A Mother, a Feminist, Aghast

by davidroberts on 4/18/13, 7:41 PM with 18 comments

• by spindritf on 4/18/13, 8:37 PM

  What's up with those weird kangaroo courts? Why aren't serious cases (sexual assault, rape) handled by real law enforcement and heard in real courts?

  I can understand that universities may want to deal with academic plagiarism, misconduct, or dishonesty internally but this is bizarre. Yet, apparently, it's mandated by the government? How is this legal?

  Not to mention that government is essentially outsourcing one of its core functions (competencies). Mercenaries, feudal legal system... the mediaevalist lobby deserves more attention.

• by flootch on 4/18/13, 9:26 PM

  Here is the former Dean of Harvard as well as the President of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education, discussing "Colleges Must Promote Personal Responsibility, Not 'He-Said, She-Said' Trials"

  http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/04/17/colleges-mus...

  In 2011, relying on the gender equity provisions of Title IX, the federal government issued standards for the conduct of sexual assault proceedings in virtually all American colleges. The Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the Department of Education advised colleges that they must use the “preponderance of evidence” standard of civil court proceedings, not the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of criminal trials. Within a year, almost all institutions, including UNC, had complied rather than risk the loss of federal funding.

  The lower standard of proof will result in more convictions—of both guilty and innocent individuals. For some, perhaps, a few false positives are merely the collateral damage of outcomes that are more just in aggregate. But this is not a convincing argument in a society that values individual rights. The lower penalty for a conviction in a college court—a “rapist” label and career-shattering expulsion, rather than imprisonment—does not justify a lower standard of proof.

  Why would the Office of Civil Rights dictate to schools they had to lower the evidentiary standard in sexual misconduct cases? Who/What was behind that agenda?

• by danso on 4/18/13, 8:47 PM

  The judicial concerns that the OP raises are not trivial, however, I do wonder if her attempt to tie them to a critique of the feminism movement is just a bit of a non sequitur.

  The judicial problems here are orthogonal to the aims of feminism, because they originate more directly from how difficult it is for schools to act as extra-judicial bodies and work within the framework of student privacy rights. At some schools, these adjudication processes deal with victims quite badly:

  http://www.publicintegrity.org/accountability/education/sexu...

  This is not to trivialize what happened to the OP's son. But to cast aspersions on feminism seems to be missing the bigger point: academic bureaucracies are not very good at handling these types of cases, which are mishandled quite often by actual judicial systems.

• by cupcake-unicorn on 4/18/13, 9:55 PM

  This kind of confuses me. The mother is calling our witnesses for having no way of knowing about the alleged events, yet she herself also has no way of knowing. I'm not saying the process isn't flawed or unfair but something also seems wrong with me being expected to take the mother at her word while trashing the credibility of the alleged victim. I also feel that mentioning feminism came off as a bit of an "angle" for the piece. In addition, I'm not sure how this got to be trending on HN - I'm concerned about the relationship to the "men's rights" movement, which while their underlying idea is sound, the proponents often end up scaring me with their misogyny.

• by paganel on 4/18/13, 8:41 PM

  I'm going to be that guy, but this right here it's a first world problem almost to the letter. I mean, we've got an adult (the college guy) hurrying to call his mother when he gets in trouble so that the latter would help him solve his problems, and then we've got the mother herself, ready to forgo her long-held believes (feminism and all that) as soon as her son's "future" is on the line.