By Professor Doom
I feel like having
an easy day, so once again I’ll discuss the demented kangaroo campus court
system. Quirks in how universities are created give them surprising leeway
regarding disputes on campus. Their policy documents were established decades
ago, when academics ran campuses, and so the system was set up to have
disputes, scholarly disputes, settled
by scholars.
The
administrative takeover of higher ed not only allowed admin to award themselves
ridiculous pay and benefits, they incidentally took control of what has become
a quasi-legal system. Scholarship has drained away from many campuses, and so
this legal system now spends more time dealing with things that, frankly, are
out of the purview of most academics…and absolutely beyond the ken of a typical
higher education administrator.
I know, considering
all the other ridiculous kangaroo rulings I’ve discussed in this blog, one more
is just piling on, but this one is just so over the top:
Now, at first
glance, one might figure “oh, she accused him, then recanted her testimony.”
That is the sort of thing that can cause a miscarriage of justice but, no, it’s
nothing so reasonable:
Colorado
State University-Pueblo suspended a male athlete for years after he was found
responsible for sexually assaulting a female trainer. But the trainer never
accused him of wrongdoing, and said repeatedly that their relationship was
consensual. She even stated, unambiguously, "I'm fine and I wasn't
raped."
Curious, eh? She
never complained about rape, so how the heck did this case even make it before
the laughable campus court system? Well, the poor guy left a hickey on his
girlfriend. Someone noticed:
The hickey
was indeed noticed by another trainer, described as the "Complainant"
in the lawsuit. When confronted, Doe confessed to the Complainant that she and
Dean had engaged in sex. According to the lawsuit, the Complainant
"presumed" this sex was nonconsensual, and reported it to the
director of the athletic training program.
And, just like
that, the poor guy’s life is messed up. I know it’s bizarre, but the same system
too blind to see 10 years of weird activities at Penn Sate, too deaf to listen
to eyewitness testimony to what was going on in the showers there can
nevertheless see evidence of rape, even hear a cry of rape, even when there’s
nothing to see, nothing to hear.
To be fair,
there’s a policy against athletes and trainers getting involved, so we do have
a policy violation here. Informed of the policy, the guy breaks off the
relationship. Alas, the girlfriend sends him a Snapchat after the breakup.
The guy asks
admin what to do about the Snapchat. Admin, eager for blood, tells the guy to
read the text and send the administrator a copy. Oops, the
poor kid listened to admin:
In other words, the man in charge of investigating whether Neal had raped a woman—a woman who emphatically stated that Neal had not done so—first told Neal to open emails from his girlfriend, and later told him he could be disciplined for opening them.”
It’s game over
past this point. The kid is railroaded through the kangaroo system, his scholarship
removed, he’s expelled…and he can’t even transfer to another school because
he’s “guilty” of sexual misconduct. No other school would dare take
responsibility for letting this “sexual predator” on campus, regardless of the
circumstances.
A laughable
investigation (for campuses, this phrase is as redundant as “tiny shrimp”)
ensues, and a report is compiled:
"It wasn't actually a hearing at all," says Neal. "I was allowed to have legal counsel there if I wanted to, but the legal counsel wasn't allowed to counsel."
---note
that the administrative title, “CSU-Pueblo director of diversity and
inclusion,” is twice as long as the title-holder’s name, so once again we’ve
found another administrative position that can be eliminated with no impact on
education and research.
So, this
“CSU-Pueblo director of diversity and inclusion” looked at the evidence
collected by another admin out for blood and convicts. Neat, eh?
Now the kangaroo
system has an appeals process. I’ve had personal experience with the appeals
process when I was at a fake community college. The way how the appeal works is
you appeal your case using the exact same information to the exact same people
who ruled against you in the first place. It doesn’t have to be that way, but
admin can do whatever they want.
Anyway, in a
non-kangaroo system, a second set of judges might go “Hey, nobody is saying the
kid committed rape, at worst there’s a policy violation here, between two
students. Seeing as there’s no crime, we should mete out a more reasonable punishment
than destroying his life.”
The poor kid
can’t even conceive of how rigged this system is. The fool makes a good faith
appeal, thinking it’ll make any difference. How did that appeal work out?
Neal
appealed the decision. His appeal was denied.
Yeah, no kidding. In
decades of higher ed, I’ve never seen an appeal go against administrative
wishes. Wonder why that is? Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s a completely rigged
system.
Finally
understanding there’s no way to get justice, or even a modicum of reason in the
campus kangaroo system, he’s suing the school for what they did to him. Even
more fantastically, he’s suing the Education Department for their hand in how
they set up Title IX, putting him into a kangaroo system that should not have
the power to destroy lives over policy violations.
As I’ve detailed
a time or two in this blog, those wronged by the kangaroo campus court system
usually have a much easier time finding justice in our “official” justice
system, despite the latter’s well-deserved poor reputation. It’s still far
superior to the thoroughly corrupt system our campuses use.
I’ll wish the kid
luck, though I suspect he won’t need it. Most likely, they’ll settle out of
court for a few million, and no admission of wrongdoing. The taxpayers will pay
for that, and no administrator will lose his job. Then CSU will hire another
$150,000 a year administrator (proposed title: Assistant Pro-Vice Director of Campus
Victimless Noncrime Reduction And Diversity) to see that it won’t happen
again…they’ll have to raise tuition anther few percent to cover the expense of
this as well.
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