Understood.
But there’s no reason to insist that someone who disagrees with you about the latter is being inconsistent or biased. The notion that the same standards should apply is also consistent.
Because the decision to expel someone from a university is not the same as a criminal conviction.
Do you understand the difference between those two things? Do you understand that one might have different standards of evidence than the other?
This is not true. Rapists are about 52% white and 48% black. So a crack down on rape would disproportionately affect black men.
However in the case of state universities being expelled from the university is still the government punishment and as such must be constitutional and include due process.
As a conservative I do not support lower standards of evidence or punishment without due process for any crime and I can’t recall any prominent conservative calling for those things either. There is also no push among conservatives for treating every crime the same and harshly punishing every crime the same.
I do see the point about liberals wanting to let criminals out of prison and pretending that prisons are the new Jim Crow and then baying for the blood of some drunk guy who didn’t immediately stop when his make out partner passed out.
But the process need not rise to the level of a criminal conviction.
My public university sometimes expels students for plagiarism. That isn’t a criminal offense, they get nowhere near a courtroom, and the evidence presented only has to meet the reasonable standards determined by the university as indicative of academic dishonesty.
I do. I’m just wondering if some may go too far. But the rules and standards I’m thinking of aren’t related to crimes of violence and rape. Perhaps I was too hasty in my post.
Many liberals would probably argue that the reason they favor criminal justice reform (ie, reduced criminal penalties in many cases) in general because the criminal justice system is biased against minorities, and we have incredibly high rates of incarceration with little to show for it. But that argument doesn’t really apply to rape, which has traditionally been underprosecuted, leaving many victims with no recourse.
Many conservatives would probably argue that the criminal justice system is reasonable and harsh punishments should not be reduced in any specific case because society is not responsible for criminals’ actions. Do the crime, do the time. However, they also tend to strongly favor the judicial process, and the problem with the trends in punishing alleged rapists on college campuses is that they are extrajudicial. Rape is a notoriously difficult crime to prove in court, because there are usually only two witnesses with contradictory stories and most of the evidence that can be gathered only proves that sex occurred, not whether consent was given. It is unfortunate that this means that many rapists cannot effectively be prosecuted, but punishing them without the protections afforded by the courts is not a good solution.
Both sides have coherent and consistent arguments.
A university is not the criminal justice system. It does not mete out criminal penalties. Expulsion is not a criminal penalty. Standards of criminal law should not apply.
It’s more a libertarian v authoritarian switch than liberal v conservative. I don’t mean to bring in large L Libertarians, but rather point that a libertarian leaning approach to crime is more common among those on the left and more authoritarian leaning is more common on the right. But that’s only a generalization which doesn’t always apply. In particular many conservatives are libertarian leaning on issues of crime nowadays. They wouldn’t call this inconsistent but rather just say that they opposed (left) liberals’ tendency to softness on crime no matter what (as conservatives saw it) when crime was rising in the US and prison population much smaller. Now crimes is generally lower and prison population higher, so let’s look at whether some things need to be readjusted, and probably in libertarian direction. Conservatives who feel that way would say they are just being pragmatic, which they believe they generally are more than liberals.
Of course liberals could disagree with any number of points in that explanation, but it’s fact that conservatives and liberals have more common ground on justice system reform nowadays than most other issues where they are more polarized.
And by the same token, conservatives who are not authoritarian leaning about crime and punishment in general don’t view it as different or inconsistent to have a problem with denying people due process via ‘convictions’ (that get them thrown out and reputations stained) wrt to sexual crimes in college kangaroo courts. And what reasonable person isn’t outraged by the unethical abusive prosecution in eg. the Duke lacrosse case? Although, there are always examples of bad behavior by prosecutors not limited to any one type of crime or accused person.
One other semi-related item. ‘Non-violent’ offender can be the subject of wishful thinking. The US has a lot of people in prison, very reasonable to ask if it’s beyond optimal. But the prison population is a low % non-violent drug offenders, something like 1/5. It’s arguable that drug convictions introduce too many people to prison (relatively short sentences on average, relatively more people going through the revolving door v. serious violent offences). But just letting out all drug offenders wouldn’t reduce prison population that much. And some portion of those people were violent, an often violent business, but prosecutors could only make a case or reach a plea on a non-violent crime. Also people on the left don’t tend to think well off white collar ‘non violent’ criminals are treated too harshly. But most ‘white collar’ criminals aren’t that white collar anyway (fake checks and basic identity theft etc, mostly by poor people, like other crimes).
The issue is “sports athletes” and murder/rape/breaking the law. There is O.J., and then some football players in my high school murdered someone - they got off scott free.
I have since seen many more cases of football players doing all sorts of naughty things and not being punished for it, but just for giggles, let’s google this…
DA won’t prosecute Alabama’s Cam Robinson, Hootie Jones…
Office representative announced the office had decided against prosecuting…
Why aren’t athletes charged with assault?
An ESPN “Outside the Lines” investigation of crime statistics of 20 college campuses from 2009 to 2014 suggests that college athletes are much more likely to avoid prosecution for crimes than non-athletes…
http://education.findlaw.com/higher-education/college-athletes-and-crime-what-happens-when-players-break-the-l.html
From 2009 to 2014, male basketball and football players at the University of Florida and Florida State University avoided criminal charges or prosecution on average two-thirds of the time when named as suspects in police documents…
That’s because “conservatives” are often religious and/or stuck in the past and think that rape isn’t really a crime. They think the women “asked for it” by dressing or acting in certain ways, or that the man is entitled to sex for some reason such as being famous.
Being expelled from university because the university finds that you sexually assaulted someone is a major penalty with a major impact. It has a significantly larger effect than, say, getting 100 hours of community service for vandalism, a charge that you do get all the protections of the criminal justice system.
Yes, it’s not a criminal penalty. But that doesn’t mean that we should accept reduced standards of evidence or no right to counsel or any of the other really questionable things going on in some university dispute resolution processes.
This is a hard problem that doesn’t have easy or obvious solutions, which is why people argue about it so much.
One of the universities near here was expelling rape victims who had the audacity to report the crime.
I don’t think being expelled for committing rape is much of a punishment at all. It’s a felony, a horrific crime, the perverts should spend at least 10 years in prison.
???
Do you have any evidence for this assertion? If true, it’s horrific, but i’ll need more than your say-so to believe that it happened.
But you’re missing the point of the argument. No-one, on either side of the debate, is saying that a person shouldn’t be expelled for committing rape.
The debate is over what level of evidence a college or university should require in order to conclude that a rape actually occurred. What proof should a university require before taking disciplinary action on an allegation of sexual assault. Some argue that it should be the same standard as used in courts, while others say that the university should be allowed to expel someone with a lower level of proof.
To me a key thing is that whatever the standard is for disciplinary action (which, yes, may be entirely different from criminal law standard), it must not become a cover for a policy of “we’ll get rid of whoever’s named in a sexual assault complaint ASAP just so it stops being our problem”.
Right.
And despite the fact that i’ve argued in this thread that the OP’s assessment of liberal attitudes was simplistic and reductionist, i have actually met a few people who do want draconian action taken before the evidence is in.
I have a colleague on my own campus, someone who i’ve talked to about this issue, who believes that ANY allegation of rape or sexual assault should bring with it an IMMEDIATE suspension or expulsion from the university for the person being accused. I expressed a concern about whether this was a fair model, but my colleague argued that an allegation like this is so serious, and has such important ramifications for the campus as a whole, that immediately removing the accused student is a valid response.
Needless to say, i disagree with this, although i don’t claim to have a perfect solution of my own for how colleges and universities should deal with this.
I’m curious as to whether your colleague would say the same thing in the case of someone suspected of murder.
The university shouldn’t be investigating it at all. It’s a crime. Do universities expel murderers or thieves?
http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/29/health/brigham-young-university-rape/
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2016/04/13/3769100/byu-rape-victims/
I can dig up better ones if you insist and I spend more time searching for an actual well-written article. They’ve apparently been expelling rape victims for years and it has only come to light recently.
University investigations into rape generally seems to result in the victims being punished and the criminals let off. If a university actually decides to expel a rapist, it must have been a really nasty crime. Universities shouldn’t be investigating crimes or deciding on punishments. Private universities do, however, have the right to keep anyone they don’t like off their campus.
If those people are convicted for something done on campus, i’m pretty sure they do. My university, a couple of years back, expelled a guy who was convicted in federal court of placing keyloggers on library computers to steal people’s data. They expelled him BEFORE the conviction.
I agree that the investigation should generally be left up to the police, but in many cases the first person the victim of a campus sexual assault talks to is a college counselor, a professor, or a dorm-mate. There are, in my state, legal requirements regarding the steps that i, as a university faculty member, am supposed to take if a student tells me about a criminal act like this. The university, as an institution, is often involved in cases like this whether it wants to be or not.
Also, most universities have a code of conduct that students are required to abide by. The rules allow for disciplinary action to be taken against such students, even if their actions are not found to be criminal in a court of law. In order to determine whether a university code of conduct has been violated, the university often has to conduct an investigation of its own, whether or not the police are conducting a separate investigation. As i said earlier in the thread, universities often investigate cases of academic dishonesty, and discipline students, even though such cases are not criminal cases. I can quite easily envision a situation where a student’s behavior might violate the university code of conduct even if the accused is found not guilty by the standards applied in a criminal courthouse.
I’d still like to see, by the way, some evidence for your claim that a university near you expelled students simply for reporting a rape.
Edit: I see that you have now supplied links. Thank you.