The plight of Brett Kavanaugh – presumed guilty of sexual misconduct based solely on a woman’s accusation and without due process – has been experienced by many young men on college campuses since the Obama administration utilized Title IX to enact its campus sexual assault policies.
“What has been happening to young men on college campuses is now playing out on the national stage with Judge Kavanaugh,” retired university administrator Patricia Daugherty told Breitbart News. “Incredible money and ‘training’ have gone into efforts to immediately side with the accuser, with little to no interest in due process for the accused. The fever pitch we see on the news has been nurtured in college.”
The Trump administration’s anticipated new rules reversing the Obama-era policies are, in fact, causing a feminist meltdown.
At The Mary Sue, Chelsea Steiner warned that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos “wants to protect everyone involved in sexual misconduct EXCEPT the victims.”
“The education secretary, who has endorsed a policy of using mediation to reach informal resolutions in cases of campus assault, wants to allow victims and their accused perpetrators to request any evidence they want from each other,” Steiner said, explaining her alarm. “In addition, victims and perpetrators would be able to cross-examine each other during the mediation.”
Daugherty, who currently is president of Eagle Forum of Georgia, said parents’ concerns for their sons on college campuses are “completely rational in this climate.”
“We are doing a terrible disservice to young men and also to young women by encouraging such emotional, fear-based atmospheres,” she added.
In September 2017, DeVos announced the Trump administration would be scrapping the Obama administration’s policies regarding cases of sexual misconduct on college campuses. DeVos stressed in a new “interim Q & A” that all students must be protected from discrimination in school proceedings to investigate sexual assault allegations.
In her announcement, DeVos cited cases of students, nearly all male, who were either expelled or punished in some other manner after being accused of actions which were never proven.
“Instead of working with schools,” DeVos said, “the prior administration weaponized the Office for Civil Rights.”
The Trump administration’s proposed new rules were leaked to the New York Times at the end of August. While Liz Hill, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said the information leaked to the Times “is premature and speculative,” the newspaper reported the rules “narrow the definition of sexual harassment, holding schools accountable only for formal complaints filed through proper authorities and for conduct said to have occurred on their campuses.”
Many college and university officials have said they will ignore the new campus rules put forward by the Trump administration.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro – now known for releasing a grand jury report alleging at least 1,000 children were sexually abused by Roman Catholic clergy in his state over 70 years – condemned the Trump administration’s decision to scrap the Obama-era sexual misconduct policies.
Shapiro said reversing the Obama administration’s policies “threaten to make college campuses less safe, not more safe.”
“We made important strides over the last years of the Obama administration when it comes to Title IX issues,” Shapiro said, according to TribLive. “And the idea that Secretary Betsy DeVos would want to roll back those Title IX (civil rights) protections is something that does not sit well with me.”
“I have all the confidence in the world in our university leaders of Pennsylvania,” Shapiro added. “They’ll fill the gap created by the Trump administration’s wrong-headed policies.”
Joy Pullmann, executive editor at the Federalist, told Breitbart News the ideology behind the implementation of the Obama-era policies on campuses sparked the fire that has spread across the nation.
“It has always been true but is now becoming obvious to more Americans that what happens on campuses does not stay on campuses, or only affect the minority of Americans with college degrees,” she explained. “U.S. colleges and universities create the ideas, atmosphere, and policies that affect the nation, plus the nation’s taxpayers underwrite the bulk of our elite’s credentials through these institutions, and this is why everyone should care and raise his or her voice about what happens there.”
“Obama’s Title IX rules that amped up campus kangaroo courts were quite clearly a test run of the kind of sexist mob attacks they want to bring to the entire culture,” Pullmann added. “The effects are to degrade society by degrading justice itself, by reducing it to identity politics rather than the truth of what happened.”
Daugherty said while she is encouraged by the Trump administration’s plans to reverse the Obama Title IX policy, she anticipates a continued battle.
“That in itself won’t change the emphasis on today’s college campuses,” she warned. “Way too many faculty and administrators are devoted to far-left political ideologies, and they are teaching these ideologies to their students every day.”
Parents of sons may continue to have reason to be concerned that liberal university pushback against the Trump administration’s new rules will still place young men, in particular, in danger of false accusations with minimal recourse.
“Parents need to teach their sons to treat everyone with respect and dignity, but their sons can’t be naïve,” Daugherty said. “I don’t want them to be suspicious of all women, of course, but they need to be aware of not getting into situations that might come back to haunt them.”
Writing at the Federalist, Melissa Danford, an army wife and mother of four boys, said what she is seeing now should stir parents of sons to rise up.
“I cannot accept a world in which my sons will be raised under the tyranny of a lawless, vindictive society that wants to subdue and oppress men in the name of equality for women,” she said. “The future isn’t female; it belongs to both your daughters and my sons. Abandoning the basic standards of the rule of law will not empower women; it will enslave us all.”
Pullmann agreed it is “quite rational for mothers to wonder whether their sons will be discriminated against simply because of their sex.”
“Given that we have not only seen high-profile assault hoaxes – such as Columbia’s ‘mattress girl’ and the UVA Rolling Stone hoax – but also a litany of lower-profile incidents on campuses throughout the country, some of which are being litigated in real courts due to the egregiously unjust outcomes,” she added.
The Daily News’s editorial board also said due process is exactly what is needed to put an end to the “kangaroo courts” that have erupted on college campuses:
Today, the accused have no way to see the evidence against them, no way to appeal. Tomorrow, they are likely to be able to cross-examine accusers, and vice versa.
…
The hands wringing that fair procedures will terrify young women out of reporting serious violations ought to be applauding efforts to make Title IX a credible tool to vindicate victims.
Pullmann added traditional sexual morality actually protects both men and women from sexual misconduct allegations and misconduct towards each other.
“Both men and women should not have sex, or sexually charged interactions, with strangers while drunk,” she asserted. “Even without alcohol, sex without a marital commitment puts both the man and the woman in danger, not only of accusations but of being mistreated sexually by someone who doesn’t love them enough to commit to them for life.”
Pullmann advised parents to explicitly teach their sons “not to trivialize sex, but to regard it, and therefore women, as precious.”
“Since neither our culture nor most educational institutions will do this — sometimes not even churches — parents must take the task upon themselves all the more if they want to protect both their sons and their daughters from the brutalities of our hookup culture,” she said.