I do not completely disagree with you but I am curious what sort of evidence that is not enough to prove guilt in the courts BG that you would consider adequate enough of guilt to warrant expulsion? Is your standard that a person accused of sexual assault is guilty until proven innocent as far as expulsion goes?
I do not dismiss the one in five claim but I would like to know more than just the conclusions of the past studies before accepting it either. How is “sexual violence” being defined? Wording matters mightily. How do they (if at all) control for self-selecting samples in responses given notoriously poor response rates?
Meanwhile using an apples to apples comparison it seems that college is not a particularly at-risk location; instead merely being a young adult woman is risky.
Now that latter study reviewed in NYT specifically does not correct for demographics which is a major point to the authors: despite the media attention upon college sexual assaults it is those less privileged than college attending women who are at the greatest risk.
If the college has evidence that you stole one of its computers but not enough to convict you, would it be unfair if you were expelled? Criminal convictions have a far higher standard of proof than anything else in life because they come with much more serious sanctions.
Being expelled from college with a black mark on your record could haunt you for the rest of your life, limiting economic opportunities and (depending on if you’re an athlete or “celebrity” student) generating wads of publicity.
So yes, serious crimes deserve investigation by serious and trained law enforcement officers, not half-assed college committees (they are best suited to pronouncing verdicts on students who misbehave in class and smoke in the bathrooms).
Colleges and universities should get out of the sex crime investigation and tribunal business. They need to pony up the money to enable trained detectives working for a state or regional agency to investigate such charges, make arrests and secure convictions in a real court of law.
One of those serious sanctions is the damage to one’s reputation as being publicly labelled as a criminal.
In our society, there is little worse than being labelled as a rapist.
For myself, I would rather spend a considerable time in jail for a crime which does not inspire loathing in people I care about (say, some drug offence - most people I care about think drug laws are unjustified), than be labelled a “rapist” or “sex offender”- and be allowed to go free.
Sure, if that happens one could argue that the lower standard of proof means you aren’t “really” a rapist or sex offender even if you are expelled as such, but I suspect that most folks will not find that all that plausible.
If someone accused you of rape, what would you prefer? A real trial, with serious prision terms if you are found guilty - but an actual investigation and actual weighing of the evidence – or some administrative procedure, whithout all that, but the worst that could happen was that you could be expelled as a rapist?
What do you mean, “prefer”? It’s not an either/or scenario.
I don’t think anyone believes student-staffed conduct boards are good for anything. The point is that the college is perfectly qualified to judge the behavior of its own students and whether that behavior merits discipline. The fact that a rape is also punishable as a crime is completely irrelevant.
Should an employer be prohibited from firing an employee who rapes a co-worker if a criminal investigation does not turn up enough evidence to prosecute?
I don’t know the answer to that. Let’s say Bob gets fired for raping Ann. But the court then finds that either Bob didn’t rape Ann or that they can’t say for certain that he did. Can Bob then sue his previous employer for wrongful termination?
A court wouldn’t find that Bob didn’t rape Ann. It would find in a criminal context that the state did not prove that Bob raped Ann, or in a civil context that Ann didn’t prove it. In at-will states (which is to say most of them) you can’t sue your employer for firing you for raping someone even if you didn’t do it. You could sue the employer for defamation but most employers will be pretty careful not to make public accusations.
The fact that it isn’t either-or makes it worse, not better. That means that results could easily be inconsistent - the same person found “not guilty” by the courts can be found “guilty” by an administrative tribunal. Certainly there is a different standard of proof, so such inconsistency is to be expected - but its a bug, not a feature.
I disagree that the fact that the same behaviour is a crime is irrelevant, or that an administratvie board is “perfectly qualified” to determine the guilt of someone in a case of rape. I wouldn’t trust such a board to investigate a murder, so why would I trust them to investigate a rape? Such issues usually require a greater degree of actual evidence than a college administrative board is capable of obtaining or analyzing.
As for employment - that depends. If in an “at will” jurisdiction, there is nothing to stop firing an employee - or indeed, firing both the alleged victim and alleged perp (unless it falls within some sort of anti-discrimination exception). Elsewhere, the issue will be whether the employer is required to give reasonable notice (and again, you can get rid of anyone as long as you provide reasonable notice). It isn’t particularly analogous to a college, as an employer usually doesn’t have access to some sort of adminstrative panel that kinda sorta resembles a court (unless they are unionized and have a grievance procedure in place).
Yes, but there is nothing to stop an employer in an “at-will” state from (say) firing Ann instead, if the employer thinks Bob is a more valuable employee or that Ann is just a troublemaker.
The employer isn’t obliged to give reasons. Neither Ann nor Bob would have recourse, unless they could prove the firing was based on a prohibited ground.
So this isn’t a very good analogy. Unless of course you are of the opinion that colleges should have the ability to expell the complainant in such cases.
One of the things that I think gets overlooked here is that the criminal system is designed such that, even if everybody is totally sure that a person did something screwed up / worthy of moral opprobrium, that person doesn’t get punished unless a very specific definition is met with a very specific level of proof. A failure to convict is really far away from saying you don’t think they did anything wrong – it’s not even an indication that you don’t believe the event happened. That’s how you get the George Zimmerman type of situation, where it’s entirely reasonable to say he did some things we don’t approve of, but less reasonable to call him a murderer.
At Bob’s rape trial, the jury for all we know could have been quite convinced that Bob did something really unacceptable, but not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Bob committed an act of sexual penetration with force or the threat of force or whatever else the particular offense requires. It’s not that uncommon for juries that don’t convict to report that they were convinced the defendant was up to no good in some way or another, but that they think the case failed in some particular technical aspect. Sometimes they even say they disagree with the way the law is written, and that they wanted to convict, but that they felt bound to follow the letter of the law, or vice versa.
An employer (or a college), on the other hand, is well within its rights when it’s convinced that an employee (or student) is up to no good or did something screwed up to take action on that basis. I mean, just for illustration purposes – can you imagine what it would be like to try to run a big retail establishment if you couldn’t fire your employees for theft or shrinkage unless you could prove it was them beyond a reasonable doubt? Come get a job at Best Buy: free unlimited electronics!
I must say you people are far more convinced of the moral probity of employers and others in positions of authority than I am.
Yes it is true that employers have extensive powers to fire people, particularly in “at will” jursidictions. But this isn’t a feature I’d prefer to see extended into other areas.
All is well in the world where they use this power to weed out the bad guys who, somehow, escape the clutches of the legal system on some technicality of other.
Unfortunately, it is equally likely - if not more so - that they will act in ways more self-interested – meaning that in a confrontation between two employees, they would tend to prefer to keep the more valuable, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the matter. Or to get rid of whoever is likely to cause them bad publicity, or act for a whole host of self-interested reasons that have nothing to do with the actual facts (or indeed to care overmuch about the facts).
[QUOTE=Really Not All That Bright]
I don’t think anyone believes student-staffed conduct boards are good for anything. The point is that the college is perfectly qualified to judge the behavior of its own students and whether that behavior merits discipline.
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Rape is not a “behavior”. It’s a serious crime deserving of a lengthy sentence in jail.
New pressures on colleges to “discipline” students over charges of sexual assault will (or already have) diminished the likelihood that well-connected students will get off without penalty (which is good) but also increased the likelihood that dubious incidents will result in expulsions or other sanctions (not so good). I suspect that once colleges are hit with enough lawsuits resulting in massive payouts to aggrieved parties, they’ll be more receptive to handing over these investigations to trained law enforcement officers, resulting in trials in real courts.
My own alma mater should be considering such a move. Despite being a well-respected liberal arts college with a reputation for political progressivism and sexual liberation (it recently hosted a Self Love Week complete with masturbation workshops and a clothing-optional photo event), reported sexual assaults on campus soared last year. And after charges that the school went easy on abusers (resulting in ugly tensions between feminist and black student organizations), students filed a Title IX complaint with the feds and a federal investigation (but not a criminal investigation) is underway.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
I must say you people are far more convinced of the moral probity of employers and others in positions of authority than I am.
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Whatever it is you’ve decided about whatever “you people” I belong to, and what we believe about people in authority, I don’t think you got it from my post.
So what about a borderline sexual assault where the facts are not clear about exactly what took place, other than that no matter what exactly took place, a student acted inappropriately and took advantage of another student? That may very well not be a serious crime deserving of a lengthy sentence in jail. Is the right thing there for a university to not even have a policy about that situation?
It’s not a false dilemma. You apparently don’t want colleges to have the same power to expel students that employers have to fire employees. You’ve already said that colleges shouldn’t be able to expel students for rape. Presumably, colleges shouldn’t be able to expel students for lesser offenses, either. That doesn’t leave much.
I know you quoted me, but that ain’t in there. magellan asked if it’s wrongful termination if the employee didn’t commit a crime. Pointing out that it’s not isn’t really a position on the piety of employers – it’s just sort of inevitably true that employers can fire people for stuff whether or not a jury is ready to convict them for it.
A lot of poor reasoning here, but this one seems especially poor:
Uh, no. Everyone who’s taken Stats 101 knows that the whole idea of statistical sampling is to take a small sample and extrapolate to the general population. Assuming the sample is both random and contains at least a few dozen folks that is usually sufficient for statistically meaningful results.
Naturally, you might hypothesize that UMass is unusually full of rapists, or any number of other hypotheses that suggest the sample was not representative. But, without more, the mere fact of a generalization based on a sample is not contrary to statistical sampling–it is in fact the goal of the field.