Tiana Lowe uses a National Review Online column to send a message to U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
DeVos has taken it upon herself to deconstruct perhaps the most contentious of the Department of Education’s jurisdictions: Its directives for campus sexual-assault cases, which are issued pursuant to Title IX, the federal law banning sex discrimination in higher education. When DeVos invited experts on the issue to private listening sessions, the voice given to men accused of sexual assault drew outrage from sexual-assault victims. …
… [A]s the Obama administration led the Department of Education on a social-justice march toward a total abandonment of individual justice in favor of virtue signaling, Kafkaesque trials of every possible kind sprouted across the country.
Obama’s 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter imposed a number of measures on campus sexual-assault cases; they were far too stringent in some domains while ignoring others. Most controversially, this “guidance” document suggested (in practice, required) that universities try sexual-assault cases using the “preponderance of the evidence” standard — meaning a student is punished, possibly expelled, if it’s more likely than not he is guilty — rather than the “clear and convincing evidence” standard, a higher burden that still requires less proof than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard used in criminal trials. …
… The true flaw of Obama’s letter was the fact that it expanded the authority of a broken system — and limited its capacity to find facts by, for example, discouraging the cross-examination of accusers — rather than fundamentally repairing it. This has resulted in show trials conducted by hapless administrators who lack the power to subpoena evidence, operating either parallel to or in lieu of a criminal investigation.
