You will find in life that there are situations where no matter what course if action you take someone is harmed or inconvenienced. Your insistence that separating the students necessitates one person dropping belies a myopic outlook preventing you from considering other options. And at least one other poster gave an alternative way for a student to complete the course without attending class, so I assume you read that and promptly ignored it.
There are no blanket answers in situations like this. You can have some general guidelines but at the end of the day you make a decision on a case by case basis.
The university has people who are responsible for making sure their rules are followed. It’s the same reason HR might investigate a fight or inappropriate touching where you work.
“Don’t Rape” may be a rule, but it also a LAW. The college can enforce their rules all they want, But they shouldn’t get to decide whether broken laws, especially laws involving violence, are kept from those who are sworn to enforce those laws.
it only delays graduation if it’s their final year. Otherwise it’s just rearranging the schedule. A good quality recording gadget costs about $100. Every class can be recorded if there’s a compelling reason to do so, like preventing someone from graduating on time. There are other ways of interacting. And there are other classes.
And this:
Nope. I have a single anecdote from years ago in which a man lost his job based on an accusation with no other evidence. Perhaps that’s incredibly rare. It was at Columbia University, if that’s relevant.
My brother also had a promotion delayed by a year due to an accusation with no other evidence. In fact, after they completed the investigation they promoted him, and shortly thereafter the accuser was fired for a pattern of lying (of which that accusation was just one case.) But yeah, he was harmed
Hmm. Take your assessment or the assessment of the experts on rape and assault (cited earlier). Such a hard choice.
And they have no ability to decide on the victim’s behalf either and to force her to offer information to the police. Whether or not they have a legal obligation to pass information on to the police actually varies by state.
I tried to wade through this pdf on who is an is not a mandatory reporter and rights the (alleged) victim has to control their information … enough to understand it gets complicated.
The university can make an accommodation, unhealthy and unsatisfactory as it may be, that doesn’t include taking more fees from one student.
This can be unsatisfactory for everyone, but the critical point is that it can be really difficult for the university, and hence put way down lower on the list of actions than it should be.
Part of the difficulty is that some universities depend on fees for funding * and are completely unwilling to do anything that breaks the financial contract*. This isn’t the opposite problem. It’s the same problem. The university needs to separate out it’s vested economic interests from the consideration of the moral and legal responsibilities.
Multiple sources all pretty much concur on this point. The BBC reviewed it pretty recently - somewhere between 2 to 10% seems to be the number of false accusations.
Others here are much more familiar with these figures than I am but I’ve never heard much that contradicts them: an alleged victim’s word alone with nothing that contradicts it may not reach the “beyond reasonable shadow of a doubt” level, but “clear and convincing” level? Yes.
I woke up thinking about this thread this morning and realized one important factor we (and certainly I) haven’t explicitly considered: Title IX.
Title IX requires that the college take whatever steps are necessary for the reporting student to be able to complete her education, including, as I understand it, transferring her to other classes, getting extensions on papers/exams, transferring her to another dorm, etcetera. The stickiest event would be if both students were in the only course section offered that semester AND the course was a requirement in both their majors AND it’s their last semester before graduation. In that case, the college should have the (alleged) assailant not attend the course–though he could meet with the professor, get class notes from others, take tests separately, etc. until the campus investigation is complete, at which time, if there’s no evidence to indicate he’s guilty, he could be afforded whatever accommodations he needs to complete the course.
The campus is required to launch an investigation regardless of whether the assault is reported to the police. I refuse to assume in advance that, as in the OP’s hypothetical, there is no evidence. **That’s what an investigation determines. **Maybe the VICTIM doesn’t recognize there were witnesses when there actually were. Maybe during the investigation, other students will disclose the (alleged) assailant assaulted them and that they didn’t report it, necessitating further investigation.
Witnesses need not have witnessed the rape to still provide corraborating evidence. If the accusers roommate tells investigators that the accused was very upset on the night of the incident, that’s evidence.
As noted before, the methodology on these studies are not up to par. Unless the accuser recants, there is nothing to say that a particular confession is “false.”
I assume you mean “a particular accusation is false.” But certainly a recantation is not the only evidence of a false accusation. The accused could have an alibi, for example.
While it’s been partially addressed, I should directly address some aspects of OP:
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 creates several complex legal requirements for all educational institutions that receive public funds, be they private or public schools (because this even includes private schools that simply admit students who are financing their education via FAFSA loans, virtually all colleges in the United States are subject to the law regardless of their legal structure.) So this stipulation is just so plainly non-factual that it should be considered invalid.
Under the above mentioned Title IX, the school will be legally required to have such procedures and policies. I would wager virtually any amount of money every legitimate college in the United States has a policy/written procedure on how to handle student-on-student claims of sexual assault.
Other than that what a University President should do is pretty simple, even if some of the mechanics involved are complex.
Any State/Federal legal requirements I have to meet, I would meet, as part of my custodial responsibilities to administrate the school in compliance with the law.
Any existing university policies would be followed.
Recognizing as a University President I am not equipped to help someone who may have been sexually assaulted, I would refer them to counseling and other medical help they might need. I would avoid trying to offer impromptu counseling myself because of my lack of qualification to do so and fear that an untrained approach on such a thing could cause more harm.
Assuming no criminal case occurs and the university investigation process does not result in any adverse findings against the accused student, I would still endeavor to accommodate the accuser as best as possible for her mental health and well being. This would include accommodations that would minimize any contact she would have to have with the student she accused. However since no adverse findings, either at the criminal or university level, had been found against the accused, I do not believe I would be on firm legal footing to take any adverse actions against him (i.e. forcing him to move to a different dorm or forcing him to withdraw from classes.) Without knowing specifics, I would speculate that in most situations the school exposes itself to legal liability if it takes adverse actions against a student when a university pre-defined process has not found any wrongdoing by the student proven to whatever legal standard was present in the university process.
after the “except that” it lists where discrimination on the basis of sex is permissible. As an aside, it is utterly amazing that the government can impose upon universities these requirements because of that language.
For example, why couldn’t a university say that they will have no policy at all regarding sexual assault allegations and leave that to the police? How is that discrimination “on the basis of sex”?
You may not like the statistics but that’s what they say: the odds that somebody is a victim of a sexual assault are much higher than the odds that somebody is the victim of a false accusation of sexual assault. So in a situation like the OP described, the accuser is more likely to be telling the truth than the accused.
Can you cite one of these statistics with a link to the methodology? As someone can be convicted on the uncorroborated testimony of an alleged victim, I wonder how these studies determine that an allegation is “false.”
For example, in these studies (and not to rehash it) what category would the Thomas or Kavanaugh allegations be placed in? And I really don’t want to rehash it, but it certainly wouldn’t be part of the “false” category, although these allegations may be false. Further, there were several follow up allegations against Thomas and Kavanaugh. All not in the “false” category? What about those against Trump and Clinton? All not in the “false” category?
You see my point. You can’t say that an allegation is false without some powerful evidence saying it is false. So the methodology is important.
We either have the very serious crime committed, that a man has raped a woman.
OR
We have the very serious crime committed, that a woman is trying to frame a man and utterly destroy his life.
Frankly, i lean towards the second as more likely. Someone that DOES want authority to investigate, but does NOT want the police to investigate, sounds like someone with something to hide by resorting to the agency that is less competent to investigate the actual truth.
Those are not the only two options. But more to the point, in the face of what is unknown or unknowable, it is possible to respond to the accuser as if they are a victim deserving of help without simultaneously taking adverse action against the accused as if they are guilty.
Then it’s time we help you out of your ignorance. Victims don’t hesitate or refuse to inform police because they “have something to hide.” They do so because less than 10% of all sexual assault reports result in conviction and because they know that no matter how solid their case is, the defense will paint them as aggressive, lying trollops. They do so because they’re afraid the assailant will attack them again out of rage. They do so because the incident was so traumatic, pretending like it never happened is preferable to reliving it by recounting it to often-skeptical cops.
The rate of false reports is very low, but some people like to believe it’s high because they’d rather believe women are apt to be seductive, lying Jezebels than to believe nice, apparently normal young men can sexually assault women. They feel safer that way.