The University of Michigan is embroiled in <a href="https://www.michigandaily.com/section/community-affairs/university-neglects-numerous-sexual-misconduct-claims-against-famous-voice">a sex scandal</a> involving a prominent tenured opera professor who was accused by multiple men of sexual assault and harassment.
UM President Mark Schlissel <a href="https://www.michigandaily.com/section/administration/schlissel-interview-0">was asked</a> by reporters at student newspaper The Michigan Daily about the scandal. He claimed during the interview that he was “a huge believer in due process and allowing the accused to defend themselves, to see the evidence against themselves and allowing an investigation to be thorough and complete, and then going through each of the specified faculty policies and procedures when it comes to a disciplinary action that threatens the removal of tenure.”
His remarks on this run counter to how his school’s policies work for students accused of sexual misconduct.
In 2018, the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Doe v. Baum that universities must allow some form of cross-examination during allegations of sexual misconduct when the case comes down to the credibility of one person or the other. This ruling pertained to nearly all campus sexual misconduct cases, which often involve no witnesses and are a he said/she said situation where one party (almost exclusively the man) says the sexual encounter was consensual and the other (almost exclusively the woman) says it was not.
Even with the ruling, schools under the 6th Circuit and across the country continue to deny due process rights to men accused of sexual misconduct out of fear that they will receive bad press and be sued by a female accuser who will have the full backing of the media and feminist movement behind her if she claims the school didn’t take her claims seriously. Taking claims “seriously” has resulted in schools automatically believing accusers and tilting the process against the accused no matter the evidence.
UM has been no different. After the Baum ruling, President Schlissel <a href="https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/columnists/ingrid-jacques/2020/03/27/jacques-university-michigan-cant-ignore-students-rights/2916115001/">said</a> the “6th Circuit got it wrong,” and defending the school’s unfair practices.
The case that led to the ruling involved a male and female student who met while drinking, had sex, and then recounted the night differently. The female student accused the male student of sexual assault, and since there were no witnesses to the actual event and no evidence for either side, the school found the male student “not responsible.” The school interviewed 23 witnesses who provided no clarity. Some confirmed the male student’s account that the accuser wasn’t drunk and others said she seemed drunk and that she was upset after the encounter.
Because college campuses allow either side to appeal – effectively allowing double jeopardy – the female student appealed and without any additional evidence provided, the school reversed its earlier decision and found the male student responsible. He sued the school, leading to the Sixth Circuit opinion.
UM did not change its ways after the Baum decision, leading to another ruling in Doe v. University of Michigan, which found the university was up to its anti-fairness ways. Criminal defense attorney Scott Greenfield <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2020/03/28/how-do-you-stop-a-problem-like-university-of-michigan/">wrote</a> on his blog Simple Justice that this isn’t surprising, given that court rulings are often ignored and the only way for a student to remedy that fact is to sue. Many accused students are minority and foreign students who don’t have such resources.
“As more suits are brought, more rulings obtained, holding that campus sex tribunals involve unconstitutional deprivations of due process to accused male students, some colleges will comply, but others will simply resist, firm in their belief that they are on the right side of history and, even if courts don’t agree, are doing what they have to, what they should, do to protect women. They are, in essence, challenging the courts by saying ‘make me,’ and the reality is that the &#8216;least dangerous branch&#8217; doesn’t have any really good magic to do so,” Greenfield wrote.

Judge

College President Says He Believes In Due Process. His School’s Handling Of Sexual Assault Allegations Says Otherwise.

Education

Lawsuit

Sexual Assault

Title IX

A recent report by Chris Stewart has shed new light on some of the educational problems faced by black youth. The report is titled &#8220;The Secret Shame: How America&#8217;s Most Progressive Cities Betray Their Commitment to Educational Opportunity for All.&#8221; Stewart is a self-described liberal and CEO of Brightbeam, a nonprofit network of education activists who want to hold progressive political leaders accountable.
The report asks, &#8220;So how do we explain outstandingly poor educational results for minority children in San Francisco — which also happens to be one of the wealthiest cities in the country?&#8221; &#8220;The Secret Shame&#8221; reports that progressive cities, on average, have black/white achievement gaps in math and reading that are 15 and 13 percentage points higher than in conservative cities. For example, in San Francisco, 70% of white students are proficient in math; for black students it&#8217;s 12% — a 58-point gap. In Washington, D.C., 83% of white students scored proficient in reading compared to 23% of black students — a 60-point gap.
Yet, three of the 12 conservative cities researchers looked at — Virginia Beach, Anaheim and Fort Worth — have effectively closed or even erased the gap in at least one of the academic categories studied, achieving a gap of zero or one. &#8220;The politically conservative Oklahoma City has even turned the tables on our typical thinking about race-based gaps,&#8221; says Stewart. Black students in Oklahoma City even have higher high school graduation rates than white students.
Had the &#8220;Secret Shame&#8221; study analyzed other cities, it would have found that educational outcomes for most black youngsters is a national disgrace. As of 2016, in Philadelphia, only 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16% were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4% of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7% were proficient in reading. In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore&#8217;s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state&#8217;s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state&#8217;s English test.
National Assessment of Education Progress tests (also called the Nation&#8217;s Report Card) give further testament to the tragedy. In Philadelphia, 47% of its students scored below basic in math and 42% scored below basic in reading. In Baltimore, it was, respectively, 59% and 49%. In Detroit, 73% scored below basic in math and 56% in reading. Below basic means that a student is unable to demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for proficient work at his or her grade level.
Then there&#8217;s gross fraud practiced by the education establishment. High school graduation rates for black students range from a high of 84% in Texas to a low of 57% in Nevada and Oregon. However, according to ACT data, the percentage of black students judged to be college-ready in English, math, reading and science ranges from 17% in Massachusetts to only 3% in Mississippi. One concrete example of this fraud is the fact that Baltimore&#8217;s Frederick Douglass High School has a graduation rate of 70% while not a single student tested proficient in mathematics and only 3% did so in reading.
&#8220;The Secret Shame&#8221; report didn&#8217;t say why the black/white achievement gap was smaller in conservative cities compared to their progressive counterparts. But permit me to make a suggestion. An Education Week article reported that in the 2015-16 school year, &#8220;5.8% of the nation&#8217;s 3.8 million teachers were physically attacked by a student.&#8221; The Justice Department&#8217;s Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education&#8217;s National Center for Education Statistics show that in the 2011-12 academic year, there were a record 209,800 primary- and secondary-school teachers who reported being physically attacked by a student. A National Center for Education Statistics study found that 18% of the nation&#8217;s schools accounted for 75% of the reported incidents of violence, and 6.6% accounted for half of all reported incidents. These are schools with predominantly black student populations. My guess is that part of the reasons black academic achievement is greater in conservative cities is that schools are less tolerant of crime whereas schools in progressive cities make excuses.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Raising hands

WILLIAMS: Progressive Cities And Black Education

Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth circuit outlined the numerous ways in which the University of Denver (DU) railroaded an accused student. Campus activists, however, claim the school doesn’t do enough for accusing students.
As The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/court-outlines-how-school-railroaded-accused-male-student-but-upholds-his-expulsion">reported</a>, a student referred to as John Doe was accused by a student referred to as Jane Roe of sexual assault in 2014 six months after the two shared a sexual encounter their freshmen year. John was expelled following a lop-sided campus kangaroo court and sued. A panel of three judges outlined exactly how DU deprived John of his constitutional rights, calling the process “a railroading,” yet amazingly upheld the school’s decision to expel him:
<ul>
<li>refused to follow leads that were potentially exculpatory;</li>
<li>disbelieved Plaintiff from the outset due to the “innate motive” respondents have to lie about wrongdoing, while failing to consider obvious motives Jane might have to lie about the extent to which she initiated or invited the sexual encounter with Plaintiff, such as her new boyfriend’s insistence that she report the incident as well as his presence at her initial reporting and subsequent interviews; 
• selectively determined which post-encounter evidence they would consider relevant (e.g., considering Jane’s allegation that Plaintiff offered her Aderall after the encounter in assessing Plaintiff’s credibility but not considering Jane’s inconsistent statements on whether the two saw each other after the encounter in assessing her credibility); 
• allowed Jane’s boyfriend to act both as Jane’s support person who was present at her interviews and as a fact witness who provided information in the proceeding to corroborate Jane’s story and to impeach the testimony of witnesses who contradicted her story, in violation of DU’s policies; 
• selectively viewed Jane as “heavily intoxicated,” implicitly rejecting Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s statements that Jane exhibited no indication of intoxication in order to support a finding that Plaintiff coerced Jane into sex but then accepting Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s statement in order to find that Jane’s intoxication had little effect on her ability to accurately recollect the encounter that night; 
• faulted Plaintiff for making corrections to his summary statement and used it to attack his credibility, despite expressly inviting Plaintiff to make such corrections and apparently violating DU’s informal policy allowing interviewees to correct summary statements in order to accurately reflect their testimony; 
• emphasized inconsistencies in Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s story while disregarding numerous inconsistencies in the versions of the story told by Jane and her friend; 
• suggested Plaintiff’s failure to recollect details was indicative of deception and guilt while suggesting Jane’s failure to recollect details was the result of intoxication; 
• viewed Plaintiff’s roommate’s statements corroborating Plaintiff’s story as tainted by Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s prior conferral regarding the events of that night, while not applying this same logic to the statements of Jane’s friend who corroborated Jane’s story, even though Jane called her friend specifically to relate to him “her portrayal of the night” and to tell him “that it was rape”; 
• attacked Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s credibility on the grounds they seemed overly eager to offer consistent denials of any on-campus alcohol use, without applying the same logic to the vague and inconsistent stories provided by Jane and her friend regarding their own on-campus alcohol use, even though DU offers amnesty to complainants who admit to on-campus drug and alcohol use, but not to respondents.</li>
</ul>
Despite this flagrant abuse of an accused student (who are almost exclusively male), advocates at DU claimed the school wasn’t doing enough to help women who made accusations, whom they always refer to as “victims” or “survivors” based solely on an allegation.
Naturally, DU leadership agreed to make their policies even more slanted against accused students, who are usually accused after a drunken hookup in which each party, according to school policies, should be considered a victim. It never works this way, however, since college women are now taught to see themselves as victims and men as perpetrators. Women are encouraged to accuse men, while men are not encouraged to see themselves as victims, unless they’re gay. This results in many male students being sexually assaulted (according to broad modern definitions that include any form of touching to be sexual assault unless asked specifically for permission beforehand by someone who hasn’t had a sip of alcohol) but not seeing themselves as victims and reporting women.
DU introduced <a href="http://d31hzlhk6di2h5.cloudfront.net/20200305/34/df/3a/4a/c657091108ddce2730008f71/response.actionitems.03.04.2020_1_.pdf">a plan</a> that will guarantee every accusation results in suspension or expulsion for a male accused student. The school is instituting “trauma-informed investigation” methods, a new concept that assumes every accusation to be true no matter what. Supporters insist it is backed up by scientific evidence, but decades long research on trauma and memory do not support the techniques. For example, “trauma-informed” techniques insist that a woman is telling the truth about being raped even if she lies to police, because lies are simply a result of trauma. The techniques also encourage allegedly neutral “fact finders” to ignore exculpatory evidence and not interview the accuser multiple times so that accused students can’t point to inconsistencies in their stories.
DU will also start teaching four years of gender-based violence education for undergraduate students. DU makes clear that all sexual assault policies are biased against men by specifically mentioning masculinity as something to be fixed.
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is expected to release new federal guidelines for how schools should investigate allegations of sexual assault, mandating that schools include accused students’ due process rights in the proceedings. Around 200 students – that we know of – have sued their college or university, and more than 100 rulings from judges have pointed out how schools have denied likely innocent students the ability to defend themselves from false accusations.

Guilt concept

University Called Out By Judge For ‘Railroading’ Accused Student. Activists Claim School Isn’t Pro-Accuser Enough.

Denver

false accusations

Teachers in Brooklyn are blasting New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza for failing to close public schools early enough, which the teachers claim facilitated the spread of coronavirus at one particular school.
At least five teachers from Brooklyn Technical High School teachers have called their union chapter leader, Nate Bonheimer, to tell him they had tested positive for COVID-19, the New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/03/21/blood-on-their-hands-teachers-say-de-blasio-and-carranza-helped-spread-coronavirus/amp/">reported</a>. Even with the information, the Brooklyn Department of Education ordered staffers at BTHS to go to work last week, claiming the building had been cleaned.
“The DOE did not close the school for any of the cases,” Bonheimer told the Post, adding that the school’s demand that staffers still go to work may have exposed more people to the coronavirus.
On March 9, the New York Education Department directed schools to close for 24 hours “in order to begin an investigation to determine the contacts that the individual may have had within the school environment.” The Post reported that Brooklyn did not follow the directive, nor did its DOE try to figure out who may have had contacts with any individual that tested positive for COVID-19, according to Bonheimer.
“They did not alert the people who needed to know the most to protect themselves, their families and everyone else they came into contact with,” he said.
The outlet reported also that one infected teacher informed all his students that he had tested positive since the city was being so secretive.
The outrage among teachers has reached a point where some are calling the coronavirus the “Carranzavirus,” and criticizing Carranza and de Blasio for failing to close public schools.
“You say equity and excellence, but every other school district closed before you did. You had these kids like petri dishes spreading this to their families,” one administrator told the Post.
One DOE employee told the Post that some believe de Blasio and Carranza squashed information about the teachers testing positive for COVID-19, which put more people at risk, saying, “The blood is on their hands.”
More from the Post:
<blockquote>DOE staffers think the two city leaders tried to cover up the cases because they wanted to keep the 1.1-million-student system running despite <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/03/14/momentum-builds-for-nyc-teacher-sickout-mutiny-over-de-blasios-refusal-to-close-schools/">increasing pressure to shut it down</a>. Finally, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo about to do it, the mayor relented and closed the schools for students on March 16. They will remain shut until at least April 20, after the spring break.
An expert agreed the failure to notify health officials was dangerous.
“The chancellor was not properly following state policy,” said Aaron Carroll, a health sciences researcher and pediatrician at Indiana University School of Medicine.</blockquote>
Carranza sent an email – obtained by the Post – on March 10 that told school administrators not to tell city health officials about any students or staff members who tested positive for COVID-19.
“At the moment, there is no reason for any school to call [the Health Department] to report potential or confirmed cases,” Carranza wrote in the email.
He said the Health Department would get the information via test results from labs.

Bill De Blasio

Teachers Blame De Blasio, Schools Chancellor For Spread Of Coronavirus: ‘The Blood Is on Their Hands’

Bill de Blasio

Coronavirus

New York

A male student at Syracuse University is trying to clear his name after the school’s investigation into sexual assault allegations failed to allow him to properly defend himself.
The student, whom The Daily Wire will call John Doe, was previously accused of raping a female student, who will be called Jane Roe. Both were Syracuse students. The two attended a party in 2017 co-hosted by John’s fraternity and Jane’s sorority. Surveillance footage from that night showed the two students enter John’s room at about 12:30 in the morning. The two, according to court documents, awoke in the same bed the next morning – fully clothed – and had no memory of what occurred the night before, as The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/she-claimed-he-raped-her-a-medical-examination-showed-no-sex-he-was-expelled-and-is-suing-her-for-defamation">reported</a>.
After John was expelled, he filed a lawsuit against the school alleging his due process and Title IX rights were violated. He also sued his accuser for defamation because she called him a rapist online and to his friends even though there was no evidence the two even had sex. Jane tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, but a judge denied her motion.
Syracuse, likewise, is trying to get John’s lawsuit against the school dismissed. The Daily Wire was provided a copy of John’s legal response to Syracuse’s motion to dismiss, which outlines the ways the university violated John’s rights.
For starters, the man assigned to investigate the allegations, Bernerd Jacobson, was a victim’s advocate, not an impartial observer, and, according to John and his attorneys, acted as an advocate. John’s attorney argues that by the time Jacobson spoke to Jane for the first time, she had changed her story multiple times. She initially said she thought she was drugged – though a test showed no drugs other than caffeine and marijuana in her system. She also repeatedly said she didn’t remember what happened that night in the months before meeting with Jacobson. Yet months after the alleged incident, and only after going to therapy for her alleged trauma, did Jane start to “remember” things, including sexual intercourse with John. Such memories are not accurate and bring to mind the “recovered memories” of the 1980s Satanic daycare panic.
Jacobson, according to John’s lawsuit “blatantly disregarded objective facts and failed to collect highly relevant evidence – which Defendant Jacobson knew existed – that exonerated Doe and pointed to the implausibly of Roe’s sexual assault claims.”
For instance, Jacobson didn’t speak to a veteran sex crimes prosecutor who said there was no evidence sex even occurred between the two students, the detective whom Jane repeatedly told she didn’t remember what happened that night, the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) who found no evidence of sex, or the representative who helped Jane fill out a Family Court Petition against John.
Jacobson didn’t even obtain a copy of the SANE report or Jane’s clothes from the night in question. Instead, Jacobson alleged that a finding in the SANE report regarding two tears in Jane’s labia was enough evidence of sexual assault, even though that isn’t evidence of anything. Even with the tears, the examination found no “abrasions to vaginal walls and she had smooth hymen edges,” according to Judge Roslynn R. Mauskopf’s summary of the case contained in her <a href="https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/GoldmanvReddington.pdf">ruling</a>. Also, a DNA analysis of Jane’s vagina found no male DNA.
John maintained throughout the proceedings that he didn’t remember the night in question. Jane initially said she didn’t remember either, but later changed her story months later. Jacobson, however, found ways to dismiss issues with Jane’s story. Even though a toxicology report found Jane was not drugged, Jacobson noted that “it was not implausible” that Jane was drugged, according to John’s lawsuit. Jacobson even dismissed police detective works, saying “well you know how detectives are, they’re great, but they write down what they think they heard.” Further, Jacobson dismissed Jane’s claim in her Family Court Petition that John raped her with a foreign object by claiming it was Jane’s claim, but an exaggeration written in by the representative who helped her. He made this determination without speaking with this representative.
With all the deficiencies, Jacobson concluded that Jane was credible, but that John’s version of events was also “plausible.” Somehow that translated into finding John responsible for sexual assault even though there was no evidence of sex.
John was not provided the evidence against him and was not allowed to cross-examine Jane or any witnesses. He also didn’t have access to the exculpatory evidence, since Jacobson didn’t obtain it. A Syracuse Conduct Board found John responsible despite finding both students were credible and didn’t remember what happened.
Syracuse, in its motion to dismiss, claimed that because Jacobson briefly mentioned the inconsistencies in Jane’s story, it meant he wasn’t biased. The Conduct Board, however, wrote off those inconsistencies, which John’s lawyers maintain further proves the school’s bias. The Conduct Board also had no access to the SANE report, just the conclusion about the tears to Jane’s labia. The Board tried to claim that because it used a lower standard of proof (a preponderance of evidence, or 50% plus a feather), it could ignore the Assistant District Attorney’s assessment that “[t]here is no credible proof of any sexual conduct in this case, consensual or non-consensual.” As John’s lawsuit notes, this is a “red herring.”
“ADA Barry concluded there was no proof of any sexual contact whatsoever – thus any debate surrounding the standard of proof required in a criminal action is irrelevant to the allegations presented to the Conduct Board.,” the lawsuit states.
John claims in this lawsuit that Syracuse ignored the forensic evidence and findings of veteran law enforcement officials in order to find John responsible. In an email to The Daily Wire, John’s attorney, Seth Zuckerman, blasted not only Syracuse, but also the accuser for their actions:
<blockquote>Syracuse is no longer a safe place for male students. While claiming to protect its female students, the university’s extreme policies discriminate against males accused of sexual assault, regardless of the lack of evidence, as they are treated as guilty from the outset. Syracuse has gone overboard, trampled on the rights of male students, and created a dangerous environment for these young men. Our client was expelled as a result of a false allegation and the school’s bogus and biased investigation which denied our client due process while completely ignoring the police and district attorney’s office determination that there was no sexual assault. The school’s investigator intentionally failed to gather critical evidence. Following his unjustified expulsion, our client has been left to pick up the pieces of his life. The so-called victim has celebrated on social media our client’s expulsion and branded him a rapist and intentionally went out of her way to contact his employer to get him fired. He will never get his undergraduate life back, nor the social media anonymity, he had before these false allegations were made.</blockquote>

Couple in ed

A Male Student Expelled Even Though There Was No Evidence Of Sex Is Fighting To Clear His Name

Syracuse University

Two professors anonymously accused of sexual harassment. Two university’s investigating the claims. An administrator who states flat out that the truth isn’t the priority. And two careers hampered by one person’s jealous vendetta. The only way to get justice was to pay tens of thousands of dollars.
The story above was told in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/magazine/title-ix-sexual-harassment-accusations.html">The New York Times</a> by Sarah Viren, one of the falsely accused women. Sarah and her wife, Marta, were doing well professionally: Both had tenure-track jobs at Arizona State University and thought they would soon be making a desired move to Michigan to further their careers.
Sarah had interviewed for her dream job at University of Michigan, where she would help develop a creative-nonfiction program. She was told an offer letter would arrive soon and that the university would work to find a place for Marta as well.
But the offer letter didn’t come as the weeks went by. To distract themselves, Sarah and Marta attended a party for a friend who had just obtained her Ph.D. Between drinks and conversation, Marta received an anonymous email claiming someone on Reddit was posting about her sexually harassing graduate students. At first, she and Sarah thought the email was spam. Hours later, they looked at it again and saw it included a screenshot of the Reddit post, which read: “If you, like me, have been harassed by Dr. Marta, please contact the anonymous email line with A.S.U.’s Title IX Office.” Ten minutes later, Sarah wrote, another post went up, claiming: “I attended a party at Marta’s house one night, where she got several graduate students drunk and then asked me to her bedroom. When I tried to leave she inappropriately touched me and I dropped her as my graduate adviser.”
Sarah wrote that the email was sent in 2019. She wrote that those first two posts were quickly removed, but two more went up in the following days. The first one, posted the day after the party, said: “Lesbian professors, too, are capable of harassing students despite common narratives.” The second one, Sarah wrote, scared her: “Hi y’all. I’m looking for advice. My linguistics professor has offered me wine several times in her office and acted inappropriately when I see her in various queer spaces in Tempe or Phoenix.”
Sarah wrote that this email was the one that really convinced her the allegations were false.
“Marta almost never used her office; she met students at coffee shops or via Zoom. And she rarely drank wine. Or went to any “queer spaces” that I knew of,” Sarah wrote. “The use of ‘y’all,’ though, made me stop. We were in Arizona. No one says y’all here.”
She realized someone outside the university must be trying to take Marta down, but she didn’t know who or why.
On the Monday after the party, Sarah checked in at the University of Michigan and was told the deans “hope to wrap this up by the end of this week,” as if some problem were about to be solved. Marta also received an email from UM asking her to call the next day. The phone call was not about a job, but about the university having been sent accusations that Marta sexually harassed her grad students. Marta told Sarah the administrator told her the school had “credible information that I’m under a Title IX investigation.”
A Title IX investigation refers to a college or university’s pseudo-legal adjudication process of sexual assault or harassment allegations. Starting in 2011, the Obama administration sent guidelines to colleges and universities telling them they needed to investigate allegations. This, combined with an insistence there was an “epidemic” of campus sexual assault, and the Obama administration’s constant claims to “believe all women,” led to schools eviscerating due process for accused students and faculty.
Sarah maintains throughout her Times article that she agrees with the Obama administration and how schools should handle allegations – yet her story makes clear the way schools handle allegations is wrong and unfair. For Sarah and Marta, an anonymous person who wasn’t even associated with the school was able to cast suspicion on the couple and keep them from moving to their dream city and taking dream jobs. And the only way to completely free themselves of the stigma was to take the false accuser to court, which would have cost tens of thousands of dollars and is a luxury most accused – especially students – don’t have.
Sarah and Marta were forced to prove their innocence, rather than the anonymous accuser having to prove their allegations.
The first anonymous allegation was sent on March 14, 2019, by someone claiming their name was “Rebecca James,” who said she was a graduate student in Marta’s department.
“I have had two undergrads come to me and one fellow graduate student regarding Dr. Marta Cabrero,” the accuser wrote. “Dr. Cabrero has put these students in sexually compromising situations. Inviting them to meet her in her office late at night — when the building is mostly empty — she has offered to help their careers (grad student) or grades and standing in the department (undergrad) in exchange for sexual favors.”
There were multiple errors that were immediately obvious to Sarah and Marta. For starters, Marta is from Spain and has two last names – Tecedor and Cabrero. As Sarah wrote, the first last name would be the primary name, so she would have been called Dr. Tecedor in her department, or just Marta, which was her preference.
The discrepancy didn’t seem to phase the administrator assigned to investigate the claim, Melanie. She said it was “relevant to point that out” but immediately began asking leading questions of Marta, such as whether she met with students at night or offered them alcohol or asked for sexual favors.
Marta said she didn’t know anyone named Rebecca James and Melanie admitted she couldn’t find anyone with that name in Marta’s department, but dismissed the issue by claiming the person could have used an alias. Melanie claimed the allegation was “credible,” even though it provided no specifics and was merely a written allegation.
When Melanie spoke with Sarah separately, she admitted that the true goal of Title IX investigations isn’t to find the truth, but to show the federal government they are investigating everything just to get more funding.
Sarah had asked if the case would be dropped if Melanie discovered the allegation was from an outsider pretending to be a student. Melanie responded by saying: “Because of the funding that we receive through Title IX, we’re required to investigate everything. And with that we want to really run everything to the ground.”
Sarah recorded her conversation with Melanie, which is where the quotes came from.
Melanie then dropped the bombshell those who have been demanding due process for accused students have always known but politicians and schools denied: “If we find out that — and Marta asked the question — if we find out that the information is false, for our purposes that’s not really our end goal; we’re just trying to determine whether or not there’s a policy violation.”
Get that? The truth – the falsity – of the allegations doesn’t really matter to schools; all they care about is that government funding – and that government funding is based upon find accused students and faculty responsible, let the accuser (almost always a woman) go to the media to claim she was mistreated because her allegation didn’t result in the accused being removed from campus. It never matters whether the accused actually did what was alleged, it only matters what an accuser claims.
Marta couldn’t have a lawyer present during the investigation, even though she was told that what she said could be used against her. UM would also not have the ability to compel the anonymous false accuser to talk and could not hold that person accountable.
A defamation lawyer told the couple the only way to hold the false accuser accountable was with a lawsuit, but they needed to know who was behind the lies.
Sarah finally had an idea about who might be behind the allegations. A couple weeks after she was offered the job at UM, an acquaintance – referred to only by a fake initial, J – texted her asking if she was going to take the job. Sarah said she knew J was also a finalist for the job, and seemed to imply that if Sarah turned the job down, he would get it. Sarah texted J back – against Marta’s wishes – to tell him that she wanted to take the job but needed Marta to be offered a spousal hire. She told J she would let him know if she learned more.
J kept texting, saying he hoped negotiations with UM were progressing and keeping Sarah updated on what he was doing. In mid-March, around the time the first anonymous email was sent to ASU, J texted Sarah: “Any news? I’ve been thinking of y’all.”
At the end of the month, J texted “WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS TO US” hours before the first Reddit posts were written.
Sarah now believed J was behind the false allegations, but neither she nor Marta knew how to prove it. Sarah watched J’s social media posts to find clues she could use to prove it was him. A friend reached out to say J had been complaining to him about Sarah getting the job and was telling people about the investigation into Marta, which he shouldn’t have known about.
Sarah and Marta told Melanie about their suspicions. Melanie then asked to meet with them a second time, saying she received “some new information yesterday.” When they met, Melanie said she received another anonymous complaint, this time from some saying her name was “Jessica P. Newman.” Jessica claimed to be one of Marta’s graduate students and claimed she was sexually harassed by Marta and Sarah.
“One night,” the anonymous accuser wrote, “Marta and her wife Sarah had a party for queer students and faculty at their house, and offered me glass of wine after glass of wine and eventually shots of whiskey. When most of the others had left, Marta asked to show me a painting in her bedroom, and when we entered, Sarah was on the bed, topless, and asked us to join her. I said I would be calling an Uber now, but before I could leave the room, Marta took my hand and placed it on her wife’s bare chest.”
Sarah said there was never a party like the one described in the email. She said she and Marta had hosted two dinners for Marta’s graduate-seminar students, but that Sarah left both dinners to put their two kids to bed and no one ever went near the bedrooms. Sarah couldn’t even remember if they had a painting in the bedroom. After some thought, she remembered she did have her favorite painting on a wall, which she had bought years earlier in Florida. While this fact didn’t mean the allegation was true (there’s a good chance one could claim anyone has a painting in their bedroom). Still, the fact that one thing in the email rang true made Sarah uneasy.
Melanie asked the name of the person Sarah thought was behind the lies, and Sarah cooperated. After that, she and Marta hired a lawyer who helped them file a lawsuit to learn identifying information about the emails that had sent the anonymous emails to the universities. Sarah also blocked J on social media.
During a weekend in the mountains, Sarah received a text from a friend saying J was stalking her on social media and was trying to find out if she blocked just him or closed her accounts. He then texted her.
“I’m genuinely sorry if communicating with you made you uncomfortable,” he wrote. “I had hoped admitting to the awkwardness of the situation would make everything OK. I guess I was wrong, and I apologize.”
When they returned, Melanie asked to meet with them again. This time she said she had spoken to UM and was sent all the emails the other university had received. She also said she was talking to Sarah and Marta’s students and colleagues and that “Jessica” had agreed to an in-person interview.
Melanie provided the women with a stack of emails that had been printed out alleging sexual harassment. Issues became immediately apparent. The same email that sent the accusation supposedly from Rebecca James sent another email claiming to be Marta’s colleague R. Orlich. Orlich, a real person, was asked about the allegations and said she hadn’t sent any emails to Michigan.
Emails from “Jessica” were sent to the department chair Sarah was talking to about the job and referred to Marta incorrectly as “Dr. Cabrero.” Jessica claimed Marta’s colleagues had discussed in an email about Marta being removed from a dissertation committee (this never happened) and also claimed The New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education were working on articles about Marta.
Another email from Jessica claimed she was going to the authorities. She presented a screenshot of an alleged conversation between herself and Marta, which showed Marta threatening to ruin Jessica’s career: “We will ruin your career. I will make sure you never get a job once your dissertation is done. My wife and I are well-connected.”
Melanie said she had already checked some facts from the email, including the conversation with the real Orlich and the fact that there were no ASU grad students named Rebecca James or Jessica P. Newman. Still, Melanie couldn’t close the investigation because “Jessica” had agreed to talk.
Melanie called a few days later to say that “Jessica” claimed Marta showed up at her house to threaten her. Sarah used Marta’s phone GPS data to show that she was at home when this alleged incident occurred. Melanie also sent another email from Jessica, which included a screenshot of an email purporting to be from Marta claiming, “You wanted to sleep with us, or at least that is what your body was saying. In Spain this would never happen. People understand their bodies and desires there.”
When J eventually learned about the lawsuit, he started claiming he was being trolled online and said homophobic comments were being posted about him. He went so far as to give a presentation on this alleged harassment at his university.
Sarah wrote to ASU’s president about what was going on, and closed by saying: “We are strong believers in the importance of Title IX protections, but we also feel like there has to be a system in place to protect faculty and students from outsiders who might use that system to defame and harass.”
In other words, justice for me but not for thee. Schools don’t just have to worry about outsiders taking advantage of the Title IX system – plenty of students use the system to get accommodations – such as delaying an exam – or to avoid being dropped from a program <a href="https://www.thecollegefix.com/judge-rules-ohio-state-title-ix-official-can-be-personally-liable-for-helping-rape-accuser-lie/">due to poor grades</a>. All accused students or faculty need the kind of system that keeps bad actors from making false accusations.
Melanie eventually told the women that starting now, ASU would fact check anonymous accusations before opening investigations, which makes one wonder: Why was it deemed “credible” before it was even fact checked?
It was now two and a half months after Sarah was first offered the job at UM when she finally received the offer letter and a phone call telling her the university was looking for a job for Marta. The two prepared to move to Michigan. While packing, they received an email from their law firm disclosing the phone number linked to the email account claiming to be both Rebecca James and R. Orlich. The phone number matched J’s.
The women thought their lives could carry on, but as with most false accusations, that is not possible. After a month and a half, UM said it couldn’t find a job for Marta. Sarah had to turn down the job.
They decided to sue J. Once he was named in their lawsuit, he started claiming he was receiving anonymous emails from someone, conveniently, taking credit for the whole situation with Sarah and Marta.
“i began trolling you online, sent death threats, broke into your house when you were gone,” this email allegedly said. “i tried to [expletive] up your job applications by getting into your [work] email, i trolled a friend of yours in arizona…”
He then told police at his university that this “stalker” threw a rock through his car window. All this made it possible for J to claim he hadn’t been the one to attack Sarah and Marta, even though the evidence pointed to him.
The problem for the women was that taking J to court would have cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the end, they weren’t willing to pay. They did eventually settle, and were allowed to write or say whatever they wanted about the case, but they couldn’t use J’s real name, even though that meant he could hurt more people.

Hacker

She And Her Wife Were Anonymously Accused Of Sexual Harassment. Their Wild Story Highlights The Dangers Of Campus Adjudication.

Arizona

Sexual Harassment

So, you’ve been working from home for a few days now and you’re not used to it. Maybe you usually work from home but now your kids’ schools have been closed and you don’t know what to do. Maybe both scenarios are now taking place for you.
Working from home, with or without kids, can be difficult, but thankfully there are enough people who have been through this (including myself) that can help you through this strange new world. One of the best sources for this information has come from The Federalist (where I also have a byline), but I’ll work in some of my own tips as well. This article will include two sections: Working from home without kids and working from home with kids.
Working From Home
Working from home can be tough if you’re not used to it. All your favorite stuff is there. It’s easy to get distracted without discipline. David Marcus has some <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/14/i-work-from-home-here-are-some-tips-to-make-it-easier/">great tips</a> for people who have no discipline, fortitude, or a solid work ethic (though the tips work for those who do as well).
<ol>
<li> Set Boundaries</li>
</ol>
Just because you are at home, does not mean you are at home. Conversely, just because you are working does not mean you must always work. Try establishing a routine with your family to know that between certain hours, or when you are in front of your computer, you are working and that must be respected. And when you’re done with work – be done with work.
<ol start="2">
<li> Take Breaks</li>
</ol>
Taking short breaks can help keep you from going stir crazy and can help you focus. Marcus suggests going out for short walks. If that’s helpful to you, do it. If you’re like me, and leaving your computer except to get food or use the bathroom will destroy your focus, I suggest multiple, super short breaks spent in your workspace.
For me, I’ve found that the only way I can easily write five articles a day is to write a few sentences or paragraphs, and then play a few minutes of a mobile phone game. So many of these games have a time component to them, such as the matching games where if you fail five times, you either have to wait 30 minutes to play again or spend real-life money to continue. I find that playing the game (just one or two levels, typically) can be enough to get me motivated to work again.
It feels like this would make your workday longer, but I’ve found that it adds no additional time to my work schedule. All the time I would spend trying to force myself to keep writing – to the detriment of my article – is replaced by the game. It’s hard to explain why it works for me, but it might work for you too as a simple way to give your brain a break.
<ol start="3">
<li> Keep Your Home Clean</li>
</ol>
Having a messy home can hurt your productivity because you find it difficult to concentrate when your house smells or there’s more trash lying about. Find time to keep your home and workspace clean, and you’ll have an easier time working from home.
<ol start="4">
<li> Social Media</li>
</ol>
Marcus suspects using social media to stand in for the coworkers you typically chitchat with during the day. It’s the same kind of distraction for many people that the mobile game is for me – it doesn’t require a lot of concentration, but it’s enough of a distraction to give your brain a break to recharge.
<ol start="5">
<li> Recreate Your Commute – To An Extent</li>
</ol>
Marcus suggests going through some of what you would do during your commute to the office, such as reading the paper or a book, listening to music, or stopping for coffee or breakfast. Marcus suggests taking 30 minutes before and after working to go through these rituals.
Working From Home With Kids
All the advice from above applies to those working from home with kids as well. In this section we will use advice from some moms who work from home and homeschoolers. The advice from this section comes from <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/16/14-strategies-for-working-from-home-around-children-without-endless-screen-time/">Joy</a> <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/14/6-step-quick-start-guide-to-substituting-for-your-kids-school-while-its-closed/">Pullman</a> and <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/16/5-simple-homeschool-secrets-to-lighten-your-coronavirus-quarantine/">Jayme Metzgar</a>.
<ol>
<li> Find What Motivates Your Child</li>
</ol>
Just, please don’t make food the motivation.
Pullman writes that children who are unmotivated to learn simply won’t learn no matter how good their teacher is, so “character training” may be the first step for them. She recommends several sources: “<a href="https://simplycharlottemason.com/store/laying-down-rails-charlotte-mason-habits/">Laying Down the Rails</a>,” by Sonya Shafer, “<a href="https://www.christianbook.com/tending-classic-stories-awaken-childs-imagination/vigen-guroian/9780195152647/pd/52646">Tending the Heart of Virtue</a>,” by Vigen Guroian, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Parenting-Love-Logic-Updated-Expanded/dp/1576839540">Parenting with Love and Logic</a>,” by Foster Cline, and “<a href="https://www.circeinstitute.org/store/books/mere-motherhood-morning-times-nursery-rhymes-my-journey-towards-sanctification">Mere Motherhood</a>,” by Cindy Rollins.
<ol start="2">
<li> Find Quality Content For Lessons</li>
</ol>
Pullman describes “Morning Time” as one of the key elements in teaching from home:
<blockquote>Morning Time is where you collect the most soul-touching bits and pieces at the heart of a real education and place them all together in an hour or two each morning to start the day. Most families will read aloud at least one classic book during this time, sometimes while the listeners work a handicraft. Many also memorize scripture, hymns, folk songs, historical gems (such as the Gettysburg Address and Bill of Rights), and math facts. Other Morning Time ideas include studying great works of art and music, working through a grammar or math problem (and then following up with homework related to the demonstrated concept), and nature journaling.</blockquote>
Other than Morning Time, Pullman suggests the Core Knowledge Series’ “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/First-Grader-Needs-Revised-Updated/dp/0553392387/ref=sr_1_3?crid=3QLK3MAKF6CP6&amp;dchild=1&amp;keywords=what+your+kindergartener+needs+to+know&amp;qid=1584126556&amp;s=books&amp;sprefix=what+your+kindergar%2Caps%2C238&amp;sr=1-3">What Your ___ Grader Needs to Know</a>.” She suggests using the pre-Common Core versions, which may cost a few dollars.
Hopefully the child’s school has provided lessons, but if not, the series mentioned above can be helpful.
<ol start="3">
<li> Help With Weak Points</li>
</ol>
Perhaps your child is struggling in certain areas. Pullman suggests finding workbooks that target these weak areas – particularly in math – in order to get your kids on track.
<ol start="4">
<li> Lead By Example</li>
</ol>
Show your child how to be organized and self-manage during this time. Show them through your actions how they should behave while working from home.
<ol start="5">
<li> Have Them Read The Classics</li>
</ol>
Pullman explains how classical literature is better:
<blockquote>Classic literature is better, as it has more complex ideas and language and good fiction has been shown to develop character and interpersonal skills. Plus reading classic works will make your children conversant with their cultural heritage and the rest of the educated world.</blockquote>
<ol start="6">
<li> ‘Detox’ Your Resistant Child From School</li>
</ol>
Pullman suggests using this opportunity to help students who are not doing well in school or hate it. Instead of Morning Time, read-aloud as a family, spend a lot of quality time together, and do the minimum required by the child’s school. It’s a way to give them a break from school without a complete break.
Pullman suggests family hobbies can also be useful, such as cooking, or sewing. She says this method can help students who feel incapable and lost at school.
<ol start="7">
<li> The Day Doesn’t Have To Be Filled With Academics</li>
</ol>
Jayme Metzgar writes that one of the first things she tells new homeschoolers is that educating young children doesn’t take as much time as you think. Until fourth grade, she writes, her kids’ academic day didn’t last more than a couple hours.
<ol start="8">
<li> “Make The World Your Classroom”</li>
</ol>
Metzgar suggests getting out of the house and experiencing things to facilitate learning, such as identifying birds or going on nature walks. She suggests building a small garden at home to teach your child about botany, or going to available historical sites. A number of museums around the world also offer online tours and virtual “field trips.”
<ol start="9">
<li> Teach Life Skills</li>
</ol>
This goes along with Pullman’s suggestion about hobbies. Teach your child some basic life skills like planning meals, budgeting, changing a flat tire, and more.
<ol start="10">
<li> Remember What You Did As A Kid Before The Internet</li>
</ol>
Some of us still remember a time when the Internet wasn’t what it was today and what we did to pass the time back then. Try making them play outside.
<ol start="11">
<li> The Kids Should Come First</li>
</ol>
Pullman suggests meeting your kids’ needs first, which will keep them from nagging you while you work. Make sure they’re fed, changed, or working on an activity before starting to work.
<ol start="12">
<li> Work When They Sleep</li>
</ol>
Doing your most focused work while your kids are sleeping will help keep you from becoming distracted. This obviously doesn’t mean you can never sleep, but try working before your kids wake up, while they’re napping, and after they’ve gone to bed for the night. Obviously, you can work at other times, but these are the best times to keep you focused.
For parents with older children, Pullman suggests implementing a two-hour afternoon quiet time so that you can get your work done while they play or work on something quietly.
<ol start="13">
<li> Schedule Your Time</li>
</ol>
Pullman provides a helpful schedule of that alternates between work and your children, if that is possible for you based on your job:
<blockquote>6-7 a.m.: Work while the kids sleep. 
7-9 a.m.: Kids wake up, feed them breakfast, read them books, then give them a craft or activity to do (or, for older children, assign them some homework or make them go outside to play or walk around the block). 
9-10: While the kids are occupied, dive into work and try to “clear the decks.” Do triage: Most urgent things first, then things that can be dispatched quickly. This will probably take your whole hour. 
10-10:30: Move your kids onto the next part of their homework checklist if they are school-aged, or bring out a new activity for them if they are preschoolers and toddlers. 
10:30-11:30: Knock out another block of work, this time switching to something that requires more time and focus than a “clear the decks.” 
11:30-1:30: Spend this chunk of time with your kids. Put lunch together, throw a load of wash in the washer together, walk the dog, read a book aloud together after or during lunch, and then set up the afternoon quiet activity. 
1:30-3:30: Quiet time for kids while mom and/or dad works. Do your hardest and biggest jobs right here. 
3:30-5:30: Regroup with the kids, put them to work on household chores (even toddlers can pick up their toys), plan and make dinner, eat. 
5:30-8: Family time. Perhaps one spouse can work while the other occupies the kids. 
8-9:30: Kids in bed, knock out some more work if you need to. Usually after a long day like this, this is the best time for catch-up work, smaller tasks that don’t require much time, energy, or brainpower, such as email.</blockquote>
<ol start="14">
<li> Get Help From Your Spouse Or A Friend</li>
</ol>
Pullman suggests switching days or times with a spouse or a friend in a similar situation. That way, you don’t get overwhelmed.
<ol start="15">
<li> Have Older Kids Mentor</li>
</ol>
Pullman suggests pairing younger kids with older kids and have them play or read together to further spread out the responsibility.
<ol start="16">
<li> Rotate Activities</li>
</ol>
Instead of having all the toys and activities available to the kids at all times, keep some locked away somewhere and rotate them out to keep your kids from getting bored of them. Pullman has a “closet of wonder” where she keeps new activities and snacks for emergencies, like a sudden radio call without a babysitter. It gives the kids something new to do long enough to take care of what the adults need to do.
<ol start="17">
<li> Set A Timer</li>
</ol>
Consider setting a timer so kids know when they can stop doing their current activity or when they can start bothering mom or dad again.
<ol start="18">
<li> Say Goodbye To Most Of Your “Me Time”</li>
</ol>
This is going to be a difficult time for many working parents, and you have to accept the fact that you won’t get much time to yourself until school opens again and you can go back into the office. But, you know, if you find enjoyment in the activities you can do with your kids, it’ll be much easier.

Father working from home

Tips For Those Now Working From Home Due To Coronavirus Quarantines – With Or Without Children

Children

home school

In a shocking ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit outlined numerous ways in which the University of Denver (DU) railroaded an accused student despite serious deficiencies in the accuser’s story, but didn’t overturn his expulsion because it claimed the due process violations weren’t related to the accused student’s gender.
The accused student, known in court documents as John Doe, was a freshman at DU in the fall of 2014. In October of that year, he had a sexual encounter with a female freshman in his dorm room. Six months later, the woman – at the insistence of her then-boyfriend – accused John of sexual assault. John was expelled, and filed a lawsuit like many wrongly accused students who were denied due process but are able to afford an attorney to try and get their life back.
For John, however, a panel of three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss with prejudice his Fourteenth Amendment Due Process and Title IX claims, but dismissed without prejudice Joh’s state-law claims and claim for declaratory relief. In a footnote to the ruling, the judges included a long list of ways DU violated John’s due process rights, writing that school investigators:
<ul>
<li>refused to follow leads that were potentially exculpatory;</li>
<li>disbelieved Plaintiff from the outset due to the “innate motive” respondents have to lie about wrongdoing, while failing to consider obvious motives Jane might have to lie about the extent to which she initiated or invited the sexual encounter with Plaintiff, such as her new boyfriend’s insistence that she report the incident as well as his presence at her initial reporting and subsequent interviews; 
• selectively determined which post-encounter evidence they would consider relevant (e.g., considering Jane’s allegation that Plaintiff offered her Aderall after the encounter in assessing Plaintiff’s credibility but not considering Jane’s inconsistent statements on whether the two saw each other after the encounter in assessing her credibility); 
• allowed Jane’s boyfriend to act both as Jane’s support person who was present at her interviews and as a fact witness who provided information in the proceeding to corroborate Jane’s story and to impeach the testimony of witnesses who contradicted her story, in violation of DU’s policies; 
• selectively viewed Jane as “heavily intoxicated,” implicitly rejecting Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s statements that Jane exhibited no indication of intoxication in order to support a finding that Plaintiff coerced Jane into sex but then accepting Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s statement in order to find that Jane’s intoxication had little effect on her ability to accurately recollect the encounter that night; 
• faulted Plaintiff for making corrections to his summary statement and used it to attack his credibility, despite expressly inviting Plaintiff to make such corrections and apparently violating DU’s informal policy allowing interviewees to correct summary statements in order to accurately reflect their testimony; 
• emphasized inconsistencies in Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s story while disregarding numerous inconsistencies in the versions of the story told by Jane and her friend; 
• suggested Plaintiff’s failure to recollect details was indicative of deception and guilt while suggesting Jane’s failure to recollect details was the result of intoxication; 
• viewed Plaintiff’s roommate’s statements corroborating Plaintiff’s story as tainted by Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s prior conferral regarding the events of that night, while not applying this same logic to the statements of Jane’s friend who corroborated Jane’s story, even though Jane called her friend specifically to relate to him “her portrayal of the night” and to tell him “that it was rape”; 
• attacked Plaintiff’s and his roommate’s credibility on the grounds they seemed overly eager to offer consistent denials of any on-campus alcohol use, without applying the same logic to the vague and inconsistent stories provided by Jane and her friend regarding their own on-campus alcohol use, even though DU offers amnesty to complainants who admit to on-campus drug and alcohol use, but not to respondents.</li>
</ul>
The judges themselves called what happened to John “a railroading.”
“But an accumulation of irregularities all disfavoring the respondent becomes deeply troubling because benign, stochastic explanations for the errors become implausible. Instead, it looks more like a railroading,” they wrote.
Even after all this, the judges decided John hadn’t proven his claims to their satisfaction. Specifically, they wrote that even though 35 of 36 accusers at DU between 2011 and 2016 were female and all accused students were male, there was not enough evidence to suggest the school had an anti-male bias. Instead, they said it was simply an anti-accused bias.
This is a common claim that only works in court. On campus, women use Title IX to claim gender discrimination because they say they are the majority of sexual assault victims. Then it would seem it would be gender bias to railroad accused students since they are the majority of the accused. But we don’t live in a fair world.

Kangaroos

Court Outlines How School Railroaded Accused Male Student, But Upholds His Expulsion

A recent ruling from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has drastic consequences for students accused of sexual assault, putting a fear in colleges that if they don’t suspend or expel an accused student, they could be held liable for anything that student may or may not do in the future.
Criminal Defense attorney Scott Greenfield <a href="https://blog.simplejustice.us/2020/03/13/6th-circuit-suspend-first-or-else/">explains</a> what happened. A female student at the University of Michigan (UM) said she was sexually harassed by a fellow male classmate in the university’s Michigan Ross School of Business executive MBA program in Los Angeles, California. UM instituted a no-contact and no-retaliation order against the accused student while it investigated the woman’s complaint. The woman later sued the university, arguing that it didn’t adequately respond to the accused student breaking those orders. For the record, the accused student in this case blocked the accuser in doorways, texted her, wrote threats on Facebook and detailed her Title IX allegations in emails to fellow students. When the accuser told the school about these incidents, UM banned the accused student from a class and didn’t allow him to attend commencement events. He was eventually arrested for showing up at a commencement event anyway.
The Sixth Circuit ruled that UM’s remedies for the accused student’s continued harassment of the accuser were not enough to say the school wasn’t “deliberately indifferent.”
“In other words,” Greenfield wrote, “even though the school took deliberate action, it could still be liable for deliberate indifference if the court, in retrospect, deemed the action inadequate.”
Greenfield pointed to another ruling from a different panel of the Sixth Circuit that made clear that the mere presence of an accused student on campus was not enough for an accuser to sue the school and claim they created a hostile environment. This new ruling, even though it involves an accused student that continued to harass a female student, will have consequences for all accused students going forward, even those who likely didn’t commit the underlying assault and who followed the no-contact order. Greenfield explained:
<blockquote>What’s a college to do? As much as Judge Batchelder’s opinion concluded that the mere sight of an accused male student didn’t constitute harassment, such that the university was under no duty to suspend or expel every male accused lest it be liable under Title IX if the female student complained, the liability is contingent not on the university’s deliberate response to the complaint, but hinges on the male student’s compliance, the female student’s subjective satisfaction with the remedy and, of course, the validity of the subsequent complaints that the male student continued to engage in conduct that the female student felt was harassment.
The only safe way for a college to avoid Title IX liability, then, is to suspend or expel the male student, since they can’t be positive that the male student left on campus won’t engage in conduct that either is, or could be deemed, harassment. Indeed, even if the male student tries his best to comply with the school’s directives, there is no assurance that the students won’t cross paths at times, particularly when they’re both in the same educational program. And there is never an assurance that the sensitivity of the accuser won’t give rise to exaggerated claims of trauma and suffering by otherwise benign and harmless action.</blockquote>

Students

Court Rules Colleges Can Be Held Liable For Gender Discrimination If An Accused Student Isn’t Removed From Campus

University of Michigan

A reminder to college students &#8212; especially male students &#8212; that one drunken night can ruin your entire life.
This particular example comes from the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University (MSU). A male student, known only as Dev, attended a yearly event on April 23, 2016, known as the Med Ball. Before the main event, Dev met up with a few people he had met a few weeks earlier during a service trip to Cuba. They are being referred to as Harry, who hosted a pre-party to the Med Ball; Jillian, who had recently broken up with her boyfriend and had begun a friends-with-benefits relationship with Harry; and Valerie, who attended the Med Ball with Lucas, her husband she was about to divorce. The story has been <a href="https://reason.com/2020/03/09/michigan-state-university-title-ix-debt-sex-medical/">reported</a> at length by Reason’s Robby Soave.
“Dev&#8217;s lawsuit is ongoing. The elements of his case resemble many others: a night of drunken sex that one party claims was consensual and another party remembers differently; a significant passage of time; an insinuation that eventually becomes a formal accusation; a fraught effort to mount a defense; a life-derailing finding of guilt. But with one court decision already against him, he&#8217;s in a tough spot. He&#8217;s financially ruined as well, and he can&#8217;t afford the caliber of lawyer he needs,” Soave wrote.
Dev, whose parents are Sri Lankan, moved to Michigan when he was young. A bright student, Dev would go on to graduate from Harvard in 2014 with multiple degrees. He then returned to Michigan for medical school. The Med Ball in question occurred during his first year of medical school.
At the pre-party, Dev spoke with Jillian and Valerie. While everyone was drinking, everyone agreed no one was too drunk before the pre-party ended. Valerie fought with her husband throughout the night. At the Med Ball, Dev taught Jillian how to waltz and to the cha-cha. In a lawsuit he would later file against MSU, he said that he and Jillian began grinding on the dance floor and that Jillian told him “I guess you’re my date.”
While Dev was dancing with Jillian, Valerie and her husband had one last major fight. Her husband, referred to as Lucas, demanded a divorce and left the event. Jillian ran after Valerie when she went to the bathroom to try and cheer her up.
At some point Valerie disappeared so Jillian went to find her. Jillian soon found her &#8212; outside the restaurant where the Med Ball was taking place and kissing Harry, with whom Jillian had a sexual relationship. Jillian fled up a flight of stairs and texted Valerie, “Just done. Don&#8217;t expect me to be ur friend anymore.&#8221;
Dev found Jillian “upset, fairly drunk, and crying,” a judicial opinion would later state. Jillian told Dev about her and Harry. Dev comforted her and eventually the two began kissing and groping each other. The two found a stairwell. Dev says Jillian removed her own dress and got down on her hands and knees &#8212; even asking for his jacket for cushion. Dev was too drunk to engage in penetrative sex, so they gave up.
&#8220;Everything was reciprocated,&#8221; Dev would later tell MSU investigators. &#8220;There was no hesitation. If anything, there was eagerness.&#8221;
Jillian would later claim that she was too drunk to consent and she had “shut down” during the sexual encounter as “a reaction to the hurt she felt from seeing [Valerie and Harry] kissing.&#8221; She told investigators she never explicitly agreed to the encounter but also never said “no.”
The group then went to a nightclub. Dev left the area momentarily. Harry apologized to Jillian for kissing Valerie. Jillian told him about her sexual encounter with Dev. Outside, Valerie couldn’t get in at first because Harry had her ID. When she entered the club, she found Harry and Jillian together.
Valerie would later tell investigators she didn’t remember dancing with Dev at the nightclub. Dev says they danced while Harry and Jillian talked. Valerie, according to Dev’s lawsuit, insisted Dev and Jillian would be good together and Dev at that point thought it was a possibility. Valerie then started kissing Dev, his lawsuit states.
They left the club and returned to Harry’s house. Jillian went to bed but Dev, Harry, and Valerie kept talking. Dev said he left the room and returned to find Harry and Valerie having sex.
Dev said he then went to sleep in Harry’s bed and found Jillian already in it. Both were fully clothed. Dev said he tried to kiss Jillian but she wanted to sleep. Jillian even acknowledged that nothing else happened after that.
Harry would later say he found Dev cuddling Jillian, so he kicked him out of the room and spoke to Jillian. Harry was upset with her.
Dev went to the living room and laid down on a large couch next to Valerie. Dev says Valerie was awake and made room for him on the couch, allowing him to touch her. Valerie later said she was asleep and awoke to Dev touching her sexually. She claims she said “no” and he left the couch.
Dev drove home in the morning, while Harry and Jillian went to brunch with another couple. That couple would tell investigators that when they saw the group of four at the Med Ball they all seemed unhappy. Harry and Jillian were unhappy at brunch as well, since Harry was mad at Jillian for her encounter with Dev.
For two years, Dev continued to study at MSU and had little interaction with Harry, Jillian, or Valerie. Dev wanted to try and spark up a relationship with Jillian, but she wanted to be with Harry.
Harry and Jillian didn’t last, and Jillian two years later requested that she not be placed in clinical rotation with Harry or Dev, claiming it would “significantly negatively affect my learning and well-being.&#8221; Valerie around that time also requested not to be placed with Dev. Because two people made a similar request about the same person, MSU met with the women and eventually opened a sexual misconduct into Dev. Jillian had gone to therapy in the two years since that fateful Med Ball, and now considered her brief encounter with Dev as sexual assault. She claimed it caused her to struggle in school. Valerie made a similar claim.
Dev was informed of Valerie’s allegation on April 17, 2018. He was not told about Jillian’s allegation until July 31. Jillian had initially said she didn’t want to cooperate with MSU’s investigation, but when she was interviewed about Valerie’s claim, she decided to move forward with her own claim.
“Valerie had a month to prepare for her interview with the investigators. Dev was given three days. His interview was scheduled for April 20—the same day as his internal medicine shelf exam, one of the toughest tests for doctors in training,” Soave reported. “Dev failed it—in large part, he claims, because of the pending investigation. ‘It affected my academic performance, to say the least,’ says Dev.”
Dev spoke with investigators, having no idea just how serious the situation was. He didn’t know at the time that the meeting would be his only chance to defend himself. Dev was suspended from MSU and expelled from the College of Medicine. He appealed and lost.
Dev sued the school, but a judge claimed that because the ulterior motives of the women were allegedly considered by MSU’s investigator, the accuracy of the proceedings could not be questioned. The judge didn’t seem to care that Dev couldn’t effectively cross-examine his accuser or the discrepancy between investigator reports regarding Jillian’s alcohol level and ability to consent.
Dev’s attorney abandoned his case, saying an appeal wasn’t realistic.
When Dev was expelled, he was $283, 000 in debt from Harvard and medical school. Had he become a doctor, he would have been able to pay off the debt, but he now believes he will never be able to graduate or become a doctor.
&#8220;I&#8217;m done,&#8221; Dev tells Reason. &#8220;I dedicated 8 to 12 years of studying for this. That was my life.&#8221;

Crowd of people

She Accused Him Of Sexual Assault Two Years After Their Drunken Hookup. Now He’s Destitute.

Michigan State University

On October 24, 2015, a young woman left the Orange Crate Bar in Syracuse, New York around 1:00 a.m. She later said a black man followed her had been staring at her in the bar, followed her out, grabbed her and pulled her into an alley, and then proceeded to sexually assault her by trying to kiss her and shove his hands down her pants to digitally penetrate her. A woman passing by grabbed Jane and pulled her away from the man.
The woman, referred to in court documents reviewed by The Daily Wire as Jane Roe, reported the incident to police, describing her alleged attacker as a “dark-skinned male” about 5’9” tall, and “heavy set with black dreadlock style hair.” The man allegedly had dreadlocks down to his shoulders, spoke with a deep voice, and was wearing a black T-shirt and dark pants. Jane could not remember anything else as she was heavily intoxicated the night of the incident. Police took her report but could not locate the alleged attacker.
On December 11, 2015, Jane was shown a photo array but she could not identify anyone as the man she said attacked her two months earlier.
The matter seemed to go away until January 24, 2016, when Jane told Syracuse police to say she saw a person in a bar that resembled the man she believed attacked her. Two other men with that person identified him. In court documents he is referred to by a pseudonym, John Noakes. Police then showed Jane another photo array, which now included a photo of Noakes, the man she had just seen at a bar. She identified him as her assailant.
John, in his lawsuit against Syracuse over the school’s investigation into him, said he “only vaguely” fit the description of Jane’s attacker. He is 5’8” and about 250 pounds.
In a telling sign, Jane told Syracuse police she didn’t want John criminally charged and that she preferred to have Syracuse University’s Title IX office handle her claims. Had police handled the investigation, they would have likely discovered that John was not Jane’s attacker, but by going through the school process, where poorly trained bureaucrats believe just about every accusation for fear of being labeled rape apologists, John would likely be expelled for a crime evidence says he didn’t commit. No matter, though, Jane believed John was the man who assaulted her, so he needed to be punished.
Jane formally reported the incident to Syracuse on March 10, 2016. John said in his lawsuit that Syracuse never told him “exactly when it became aware of the alleged sexual assault . . . or when John Noakes was identified as a suspect.”
Documents show Syracuse formerly opened an investigation into John on the day Jane reported the incident to them, but on March 4, John received a letter from the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs, who is also the Director of the Office of Student Rights and Responsibilities. That letter informed John that he had been accused of sexually assaulting another Syracuse student. John was immediately placed on an interim suspension. The letter told John it was worthless to try to appeal the interim punishment because he “should anticipate that this interim suspension will continue at least until this matter is resolved in full through the University Conduct System.’”
On March 7 (still three days before Jane formerly reported her claims to Syracuse) John was informed the university would hear his appeal over his interim suspension on March 9. He was issued a no contact order that placed restrictions on John that made it difficult for him to investigate the charges against him. The university found John had likely sexually assaulted Jane and upheld his interim suspension.
The evidence used against John was the fact that he had also been at the same popular bar as Jane the night of the alleged incident and that Jane had identified him in that photo lineup after seeing him at another bar. The university appeals board concluded John was “not completely credible” and claimed he didn’t give a factual statement regarding the incident. John, in his lawsuit, disputes the claim, saying he denied assaulting Jane and had provided Syracuse with evidence from his phone showing he was on his phone with friends at the time he was allegedly attacking Jane.
His lawsuit concluded that Syracuse rejected this evidence, claiming the text messages he provided were not an “official phone record” and didn’t “support or refute whether the alleged incident occurred.”
Syracuse collected statements from eight witnesses. Just one of those people claimed to see Jane’s alleged attacker, whom she later identified as John based on a Facebook photo. All other witnesses explained when they had seen either Jane or John that night. Several of John’s friends confirmed that they left the bar around 12:50 a.m. to go get pizza. John apparently forgot something at the bar, so he “ran back” with a friend to get it, but no one saw him attack any woman.
John says Syracuse discouraged him from seeking advice from an advisor. The school also found Jane credible despite different versions of the night in question and her admitted intoxication. Syracuse, according to John’s lawsuit, chose one of Jane’s version of events and stuck with it, going so far as to call conflicting statements in her police report “inaccurate.”
That is not to say Jane made up the incident. She was drunk and didn’t remember much about what happened. That shouldn’t be used to suggest the event didn’t happen, but it shouldn’t be ignored when discussing the educational future of another student. This is not a case of two people who knew each other hooking up and regretting it, this is a case where one student says a stranger assaulted her, and the alleged stranger said it wasn’t him and provided phone evidence to support his claim.
Jane didn’t testify at John’s hearing, so he couldn’t cross-examine her and the school hearing board couldn’t adequately “assess [her] credibility.”
The woman who identified John as the attacker through a Facebook photo admitted during the hearing that she only saw Jane’s attacker “through the corner of [her] eye.”
John said he was never alone on the night of the alleged incident and had never seen Jane. Both Jane and the woman who later identified John described Jane’s attacker as wearing dark pants, yet John was wearing khakis the night of the incident.
Even though the hearing board never even heard from Jane, they deemed her testimony “mostly credible” and ruled that John “more likely than not” assaulted Jane.
John was suspended. He sued Syracuse, which tried to dismiss the lawsuit. A judge denied their motion to dismiss, and on February 26, 2020 – more than four years after the alleged incident – John and Syracuse agreed to an undisclosed settlement, as <a href="https://twitter.com/kcjohnson9/status/1232857737031188481/photo/1">reported</a> by author and professor K.C. Johnson.
This is one of those cases that really highlights how inept schools are at adjudicating claims of sexual assault. John maintained his innocence and provided credible evidence he was not the attacker, yet the school went forward based on the accuser’s word. This means that the real perpetrator got away with what he did and is still walking the streets.

dark alley

She Accused Him Of Sexually Assaulting Her In An Alley. Syracuse Ignored Evidence That He Didn’t Do It.

In yet another weird claim, Joe Biden now says he “became a professor” after he left the White House.
During a campaign event in Georgetown, South Carolina on Wednesday, the former vice president said he “became a teacher, became a professor&#8221; instead of “taking a Wall Street job&#8221; when he left the White House in 2017.
But teachers teach. Biden didn&#8217;t teach. Not one class.
&#8220;The University of Pennsylvania did indeed make Biden the &#8216;Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor&#8217; in 2017, but neither the school nor Biden expected him to teach any classes, according to comments at the time,&#8221; the <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2020/02/28/biden-penn-professor-south-carolina/">Daily Caller</a> reported.
<blockquote>“He will not be teaching classes,” Biden spokesperson Kate Bedingfield said in 2017.
One article at The Daily Pennsylvanian featured the headline “No One Is Really Sure What Joe Biden Will Be Doing At Penn.”
UPenn announced Biden’s hiring on February 7, just a week after he left office, and by the end of February Biden’s role was “still uncertain” and “being ironed out,” University spokesperson Stephen MacCarthy told the Pennsylvanian.</blockquote>
And it turned out to be a pretty sweet gig &#8212; every bit as lucrative as a Wall Street job.
Biden delivered four on-campus speeches in 2017 and four more the next year. Penn paid him $776,527 &#8212; &#8220;nearly double the average salary for everyday professors,&#8221; according to <a href="https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/07/10/joe-biden-penn-salary/">PhillyMag</a>. In 2017, &#8220;the average annual salary for everyday full professors at Penn — excluding high-earners like doctors who don’t usually teach — was $214,000.&#8221;
In its 2019 piece, the magazine also said Biden &#8220;made $15.6 million over the past two years.&#8221;
Biden, 78, either has a really hard time remembering what he did &#8212; and didn&#8217;t &#8212; do, or he has an odd relationship with the truth.
In at least three campaign appearances over the last few weeks, Biden said that during a trip to South Africa in the 1970s, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-has-suddenly-started-claiming-he-was-arrested-while-visiting-nelson-mandela-but-his-story-doesnt-add-up">he was arrested</a> as he sought to visit Nelson Mandela in prison.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” Biden said at a campaign event in South Carolina, the New York Times reported. “I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robbens (sic) Island.”
“After he got free and became president, he came to Washington and came to my office,” Biden said later at a black history awards lunch in Las Vegas. “He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me.’”
But Biden never mentioned the arrest in his memoir &#8212; and he&#8217;s never mentioned it on the campaign trail until now, a week before the vote in South Carolina, where blacks will play a large role in picking the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee. And Biden said he was arrested in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg, a city in the northeast of the country. But at the time, Mandela <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/more-questions-biden-says-he-was-arrested-trying-to-visit-mandela-who-was-900-miles-away">was being held</a> on Robben Island, near Cape Town in the southwest part of the country &#8212; The two sites are some 900 miles apart.
A campaign spokesman recast the whole tale this week, saying Biden wasn&#8217;t arrested, but instead “separated” from a congressional delegation for a short period while at a South African airport.
“He was separated from his party at the airport,&#8221; Kate Bedingfield told reporters after Tuesday night&#8217;s Democratic debate.
“It was a separation. They &#8212; he was not allowed to go through the same door that the — the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg.”

Presidential Candidate Joe Biden Campaigns Ahead Of Primary In South Carolina

Biden Says He ‘Became A Professor’ After Leaving White House — Made $775,000, Never Taught A Class

Joe Biden

President Trump held a White House roundtable meeting on Thursday to discuss the positive steps the administration has taken toward helping members of the black community.
During the meeting, Jack Brewer, a professor at the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham University and former NFL player, told Trump that the president had inspired him to abandon the Democratic Party. 
“I ran the NFL players for Obama, I’ve been a Democrat all my life &#8230; and you changed me, you changed me, you touched me, and you made my work go to another level, you inspire me,” said Brewer. Later in the meeting, Brewer dropped this line: &#8220;Mr. President, I don&#8217;t mean to interrupt, but I&#8217;ve got to say this because it&#8217;s Black History Month: Man, you the first black president.”
After the remark, the room burst into applause. The remark echoed similar comments made earlier in the meeting, when two different members of the roundtable called Trump the best president since Abraham Lincoln.
According to <a href="https://realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/02/27/cnns_keith_boykin_man_who_called_trump_first_black_president_an_uncle_tom.html">RealClearPolitics</a>, during an episode of “CNN Tonight” with Don Lemon, commentator Keith Boykin said the event was unserious, and condemned the president’s outreach to the black community.
“He’s been president for almost four years now, and he’s never made a single visit to a black community to attend a black event,” said Boykin. “For g*ds sake, he hasn’t even gone to the black community in Washington D.C., he hasn’t gone to the black community in New York, in Harlem, or in Brooklyn where he lived.”
“The idea that anybody would sit in the room with Donald Trump and call him the first black president, after we had Barack Obama as the president of the United States, shows just what kind of Uncle Toms were sitting in that room in the first place,” Boykin told Lemon, who audibly cringed. “That&#8217;s ridiculous. It’s an outrage that anyone would sit in that room and say something like that.”
During the meeting, Trump offered a story about helping students who attend historically black colleges and universities, a story he said that “the press doesn’t write about.”
“Every year, a group of wonderful people from the Black colleges and universities, would come up to my office – a lot of people, forty, thirty-five, fifty, [during] one year – and after the second year I said, ‘How come you keep coming back,’” asked Trump.
“One of the gentlemen, who is a great guy from one of the schools, good school, very good school, he said ‘we come back because we have to,’” recalled Trump. “‘They want us to come back every single year, they want us to beg.’ He used that word.”
Last year, Trump signed a bill authorizing over $250 million for minority-serving colleges and universities, including $85 million for historically black colleges, reports the <a href="https://apnews.com/c4834e48841d97c5a93312b1bf75302a">Associated Press</a>.
“When I took office, I promised to fight for HBCUs, and my administration continues to deliver,” Trump said at the time. “A few months ago, funding for HBCUs was in jeopardy, but the White House and Congress came together and reached a historic agreement.”

CNN Cutbacks Result in Layoffs

Black Professor Calls Trump ‘First Black President’; CNN Contributor Responds: ‘Uncle Toms’

African American

Donald Trump

Keith Boykin

The Department of Justice on Tuesday filed <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1252046/download">an amicus brief</a> in support of an organization suing Harvard and alleging their raced-based admissions process violates federal civil rights law and Supreme Court precedent.
The DOJ released <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-amicus-brief-explaining-harvard-s-race-based-admissions-process">a statement</a> announcing its amicus brief, saying Harvard accepts federal money and must adhere to civil rights laws.
“Race discrimination hurts people and is never benign,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division. “Unconstitutionally partitioning Americans into racial and ethnic blocs harms all involved by fostering stereotypes, bitterness, and division among the American people. The Department of Justice will continue to fight against illegal race discrimination.”
At issue is the accusation from Students for Fair Admissions, an education organization representing students and parents, that Harvard discriminates against Asian-American applicants during the application process. SFA has sued Harvard, and a district judge has denied Harvard’s attempts to get the lawsuit dismissed.
“Although the Supreme Court has held that colleges receiving federal funds may consider applicants’ race in certain limited circumstances, the district court’s factual findings demonstrated that Harvard’s use of race is anything but limited. The district court concluded that ‘more than one third of the admitted Hispanics and more than half of the admitted African Americans, would most likely not be admitted in the absence of Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process,’” the DOJ statement said. “And these race-based bonuses come at a significant cost to Asian-American applicants, who collectively suffer a substantial penalty under Harvard’s race-based admissions regime. Nevertheless, the district court concluded that Harvard’s use of race in the admissions process did not violate federal law or Supreme Court precedent.”
“The United States’ amicus brief explains that the evidence at trial showed ‘that Harvard actively engages in racial balancing that Supreme Court precedent flatly forbids,’” the DOJ continued. “The evidence also demonstrated that Harvard’s admissions officers consistently score Asian American applicants lower on the so-called ‘personal rating.’ ‘In other words,’ the brief explains, ‘Harvard’s admissions officers tended to evaluate Asian Americans, as compared to members of other racial groups, as having less integrity, being less confident, constituting less-qualified leaders, and so on.’ ‘That disparity,’ the brief points out, ‘is undisputed, and unexplained.’ For these and other reasons, the United States urged the appellate court to reverse the district court’s judgment.”
Here’s how Harvard discriminates against Asian-Americans: First, admissions officers assign a numerical rating to each applicant, from 1 to 4. The numerical ratings refer to the academic, extracurricular, athletic, and personal ratings for each applicant. As the DOJ said in its brief, “Throughout the admissions cycle, admissions leaders closely monitor the racial composition of the applicant pool and tentatively admitted students and compare them to the previous year’s racial composition.”
The kick comes from the “personal rating,” where admissions officers used race as a factor in their rating, though officers testified they didn’t use race. Statistics showed that Asian-Americans had lower personal ratings, and that if those ratings were removed, the makeup of Harvard’s incoming freshman classes would be significantly different. It was argued in court that race was indeed a factor in the “personal ratings” for incoming applicants.

Harvard Admissions scandal

DOJ: ‘Harvard’s Race-Based Admissions Process Violates Federal Civil-Rights Law’

Harvard

Racism

An attorney representing actress Lori Loughlin and fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli is asking a judge to delay his clients’ trials, citing “exonerating” evidence that has been recently revealed.
Fox News <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/lori-loughlin-mossimo-giannulli-lawyer-fbi-college-admissions-scandal-lie">reported</a> that Sean M. Berkowitz, who is representing the couple, wrote in court documents that personal notes written by William “Rick” Singer – the man behind the entire college admissions scam – was allegedly told to lie by the FBI. The notes, according to Berkowitz, suggest the FBI told Singer to say he made Loughlin and others who participated in the scam that the money they were providing to him was a bribe, not a donation to the school.
“Singer’s notes indicate that FBI agents yelled at him and instructed him to lie by saying that he told his clients who participated in the alleged ‘side door’ scheme that their payments were bribes, rather than legitimate donations that went to the schools,” Berkowitz argued in court documents. “They further note the Government’s desire to ‘nail’ one of the defendants ‘at all costs.’”
Singer’s notes said FBI investigators asked him to “bend the truth” when it came to the scandal.
“Loud and abrasive call with agents,” the notes said, as reported by Fox. “They continue to ask me to tell a fib and not restate what I told my clients as to where their money was going &#8212; to the program not the coach and that it was a donation and they want it to be a payment.”
Berkowitz also took prosecutors to task for withholding the evidence, which he says forced Loughlin and Giannulli to seek court remedies to obtain the evidence.
“The supplemental discovery produced today demonstrates that the Government was simply not being truthful with Defendants or the Court in the above filings, given that as early as October 2, 2018, Singer told agents working on the case the exact information we have been seeking in discovery, and those agents attempted to bully him into lying and saying something different,” Berkowitz argued. “This belated discovery, which should have been produced no later than 30 days after indictment, is devastating to the Government’s case and demonstrates that the Government has been improperly withholding core exculpatory information, employing a &#8216;win at all costs&#8217; effort rather than following their obligation to do justice.”
“The Government is trying to benefit from withholding information in violation of its obligations and the Defendants’ constitutional rights, but then force trial as quickly as it can. The Government should not be rewarded, nor the Defendants punished, for this kind of egregious lack of candor and violation of its obligations,” he concluded.
As Fox reported, Loughlin and Giannulli plead not guilty to bribery charges that accused the couple of arranging a $500,000 bribe to Singer to get their daughters not only into the University of Southern California (USC) but also on the crew team even though they had never participated in the sport.
“The charge of conspiracy to commit federal program bribery carries a maximum sentence of up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. The couple was <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/lori-loughlin-mossimo-giannulli-indicted-on-fraud-and-money-laundering-charges-in-college-admissions-scandal">previously hit with charges</a> of money laundering and conspiracy that could land them behind bars for <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/lori-loughlin-mossimo-giannulli-could-face-even-more-jail-time-following-money-laundering-indictment-experts-say">40 years if convicted on all of them</a>,” Fox reported.

Lori Loughlin

Attorney For Lori Loughlin, Mossimo Giannulli Argues FBI Instructed Mastermind Behind College Admissions Scandal To Lie

Crime

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos slammed socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a critic of school choice, this week over the representative’s hypocrisy after it was revealed that she got her goddaughter into a charter school.
“This area’s like a lot of where my family is from,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a Facebook Live video in 2017, before she was a public figure. “My goddaughter, I got her into a charter school, like, maybe a block or two down.”
&#8220;Embracing charters would be a big no-no for Ocasio-Cortez’s Democratic socialist base, which calls for the total abolition of charters, arguing that their existence hurts traditional public schools,&#8221; The New York Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/02/22/aoc-says-she-got-goddaughter-into-bronx-charter-school/">reported</a>. &#8220;Though Ocasio-Cortez has frequently talked about how her own family fled the Bronx to avoid the borough’s failing public schools, she has also publicly stood in total lockstep with anti-charter advocates.&#8221;
The Post noted that Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s party said in its New York City platform, “Charter schools act as tools for privatizing education and weakening the power of unionized teachers,” and called for ending “the creation of new charter schools, [banning] the expansion of existing charter schools, and transform[ing] existing charter schools into public schools.”
Ocasio-Cortez also strongly opposed school choice in a <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1086304554734571521">tweet</a> last January, writing, &#8220;Tens of thousands of LA public school teachers, parents, and students are on a historic strike to improve + protect local public schools from privatization. This is inspiring!&#8221;
DeVos responded to The Post&#8217;s report by highlighting Ocasio-Cortez&#8217;s hypocrisy, tweeting, &#8220;How nice that 
@AOC claims to have helped her goddaughter get into a public charter school. It’s a shame she works to deny that opportunity to every other disadvantaged family in America. &#8216;Good for me, but not for thee,&#8217; indeed. #EducationFreedom&#8221;
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
How nice that <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AOC</a> claims to have helped her goddaughter get into a public charter school. It’s a shame she works to deny that opportunity to every other disadvantaged family in America. “Good for me, but not for thee,” indeed. <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/EducationFreedom?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#EducationFreedom</a><a href="https://t.co/a2RhOEeU0o">https://t.co/a2RhOEeU0o</a>
&mdash; Secretary Betsy DeVos (@BetsyDeVosED) <a href="https://twitter.com/BetsyDeVosED/status/1232036448339140610?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 24, 2020</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
Ray Domanico, director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute, blasted Ocasio-Cortez for her hypocrisy.
“I am not surprised by the hypocrisy,” Domanico told The Post. “Charter schools are incredibly popular with the communities and populations that a lot of these Democratic politicians claim to be representing … People in the Bronx can find a good school for their young ones now as the congresswoman apparently did for her goddaughter.”
Despite her apparent opposition to school choice, Ocasio-Cortez accidentally made the case for school choice earlier this week during an interview with The Breakfast Club.
“We do need to address situations with charter schools, I think. It doesn’t mean that they’re all bad, it doesn’t mean that they should one hundred percent go away,” Ocasio-Cortez <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/02/25/aoc-mistakenly-makes-the-case-for-school-choice/">said</a>. “The charter school movement, especially in about the 1970s, they were community charters. So, often times it was pastors, community organizers, starting community-based schools. So the school came from the community, it was for the community.”
Ocasio-Cortez continued, “My cousin, and you know my goddaughter, he made a choice given what that was in the South Bronx. And he asked me to help him. Would I help him fill out the form so that he could pursue this choice that he made for his daughter. How are you gonna tell someone no?”

AOC Devos

School Choice Opponent AOC: I Got Goddaughter Into Charter School. Education Secretary DeVos Rips Her.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Betsy DeVos

Footage was <a href="https://www.wesh.com/article/please-let-me-go-video-shows-6-year-old-sobbing-during-arrest-at-orlando-school/31086967#">released</a> this week <a href="https://twitter.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1232670703624781824?s=20">showing</a> police officer in Orlando walking into an elementary school and arresting a 6-year-old girl. The child, accused of having a &#8220;tantrum&#8221; and hitting her teachers, had her hands bound by zip ties – the officer said he would have used handcuffs but her wrists were too small – and was put in the back of a squad car while she cried and trembled in terror, pleading for another chance. The courageous cops, valiantly defending society from ill-tempered first graders, took the child to a detention center where her mug shot was taken and she was officially brought up on charges of criminal assault. Just to reiterate: she was 6-years-old.
The officer in charge can be heard in the body cam footage bragging that this &#8220;breaks his record&#8221; for the youngest child he&#8217;s ever arrested. In fact, he broke it twice that day because another 6-year-old was also hauled away to jail. This officer, Dennis Turner, apparently has a history of being a power drunk scumbag. He was <a href="https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/25/video-shows-officer-who-arrested-children-repeatedly-tasing-man/">investigated</a> back in 2015 for tasing a man five times even though the suspect wasn&#8217;t actively resisting arrest. <a href="https://heavy.com/news/2019/09/dennis-l-turner/">Reportedly</a>, he was also arrested back in 1998 for aggravated assault of a child.
Turner has been fired for his actions at the school, but serious questions remain. For instance, how did a callous incompetent like Turner, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/09/23/girl-tantrum-orlando-classroom-arrested-battery-school-investigation/">twice put under internal investigation</a> by his department, end up as a resource officer at an elementary school? And more broadly, is it really a good idea to criminalize childhood misbehavior? This may be an extreme example, but grade schools across the country have increasingly been <a href="http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/10/28/disturbing-and-disrupting-school-laws-criminalize-students-misbehavior">treating discipline problems as legal infractions</a>. Kids who lack emotional maturity – not because there&#8217;s something wrong with them, but merely because they&#8217;re kids – now face the possibility of a criminal record for behavior that would have simply landed their parents and grandparents in detention. The <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/10/23/bullying-is-bad-but-criminalizing-bullying-would-be-even-worse/#1d166b851446">criminalization of schoolyard bullying</a> is another example of this trend.
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Children, especially in the elementary school ages, are not reasonable creatures. They do not possess the psychological capacity to express their emotions or control their actions the same way adults can. This, again, is not their fault. It&#8217;s just a natural facet of childhood. We were all unreasonable and emotional children once. Some of us still are. This doesn&#8217;t mean that misbehavior, disrespect, etc., should be tolerated or that disruptive children should be given free rein to do whatever they want, but it does mean that we can&#8217;t hold them to the same standard as adults. It may be assault for an adult to punch another adult. It is not assault when a child hits, any more than it&#8217;s theft when a toddler steals a Barbie doll from her daycare center. This is a matter of culpability. We used to understand that children have little of it.
But we are not just criminalizing childhood. Where it is not criminalized, it is medicalized. <a href="https://www.cchrint.org/psychiatric-drugs/children-on-psychiatric-drugs/">Over 7 million children</a> in this country have been placed on psychiatric medication, and nearly half of those cases are ADHD. All in all, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html">about 6 million children</a> – well over half of them under the age of 11 – have been diagnosed with this phantom disorder. Boys are twice as likely to be diagnosed as girls. As I&#8217;ve <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/walsh-adhd-matt-walsh">argued extensively elsewhere</a>, the ADHD diagnosis turns normal childhood behaviors into symptoms of mental illness. It may be true that these behaviors are difficult to deal with, especially in the school system, but that by no means makes them &#8220;disordered.&#8221; If the school system&#8217;s proper function depends on drugging millions of kids, then it seems to me that the system is disordered. The sickness is not in our kids but in our attitude toward them and our expectations of them. If millions of 9-year-old boys have trouble sitting at their desk for 8 hours a day, performing busy work, and regurgitating information onto Scantron sheets, perhaps we should consider the possibility that this is a very bad way of educating 9-year-old boys. Though it may indeed be the easiest way. For us, that is.
Our children aren&#8217;t mentally disordered. They aren&#8217;t criminals. And this generation of children isn&#8217;t very different from any generation before them. It&#8217;s just that those previous generations weren&#8217;t made into mental patients or fugitives if they made the mistake of acting their age. Kids were given time and space to be kids. Children today deserve the same consideration.

Classroom

WALSH: A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested And Charged For A ‘Tantrum’ In School. We Have To Stop Criminalizing Childhood.

ADHD

Mental Illness

Two Christian students, each struggling with their sexual desires and faith, engage in sexual activity on three separate occasions. Each occasion proceeds the same way, yet the woman would later claim – after a professor suggest she do so – that the final encounter was sexual assault. Her story would then change and evolve over time, something the “trauma-informed” school officials claimed made her more credible, not less.
The case involves a Syracuse University student referred to in court documents reviewed by The Daily Wire as John Doe and a female student referred to only as RP. The two students met through church and began spending time together when they both went to Syracuse. John’s lawsuit stated that neither he nor RP had “extensive sexual experience,” and they were each in a committed relationship when their sexual activity began.
John&#8217;s lawsuit insisted that RP gave “affirmative consent at every stage” of each sexual encounter, even though she would later deny this to administrators in an ever-evolving story of sexual assault. On the first encounter, John asked RP to “hang out.” RP responded by saying her boyfriend had just broken up with her. The two had dinner and returned to John’s apartment. They began kissing, which progressed to “mutual fondling,” before the two moved into John’s bedroom. They removed each other’s clothing and attempted vaginal intercourse but could not due to their inexperience. After the encounter, the two struggled with how it violated their Christian values. John also felt extreme guilt for cheating on his girlfriend. He felt “such emotional anguish” that RP even “offered to take him to the hospital,” John’s lawsuit said, but he refused. Instead, John sought counseling from a Christian professional.
The second encounter progressed similarly: The two struggled with their feelings, suggested they avoid each other so as not to be tempted, met up anyway (RP voluntarily drove to John’s apartment), engaged in similar sexual contact, and then again worried about violating their Christian beliefs.
The third encounter was similar as well. After saying they would avoid each other, the two saw each other in church. RP said she didn’t have money for lunch, so John invited her to his apartment to eat. RP would later claim she didn’t want to go to John’s apartment, but she voluntarily drove her own car there. The two started kissing once inside the apartment, which escalated again into John’s bedroom, where the two removed each other’s clothes and engaged in mutual fondling. John said he was aware they would both likely regret the encounter, but RP told him not to worry and that it didn’t bother her, according to John’s lawsuit. During this encounter, the two succeeded in vaginal intercourse. Afterward, the two again discussed their guilty feelings about violating their faith. RP was also upset because she planned to recommit to her previous boyfriend and was no longer a virgin.
Two days later, RP told one of her professors about her sexual encounters. This professor allegedly told her to rethink the consensual events as non-consensual, according to John’s lawsuit. Syracuse never investigated the professor’s role in RP bringing forth sexual assault allegations against John, nor did it seek to determine whether what she told the professor was different than what she would later tell police and administrators. RP also at this time deleted all text messages between herself and John in order to eliminate evidence of their “consensual contact and communications,” John’s lawsuit said.
RP reported John to the Syracuse Department of Public Safety (DPS), who referred her to the Syracuse Police Department (SPD). RP told an officer at this time that she did not consent to any of the sexual relations with John on their third encounter. She would later say she consented to kissing.
DPS issued a no-contact order but did not inform John about it. RP was not informed that John wasn’t told about the order, leading her to make additional claims that he violated the no-contact order. John left a voicemail for RP on November 27, 2016. RP complained a week later but admitted that John had not been inappropriate, and she was not fearful of him. John wasn’t informed of the no-contact order until December 1, 2016.
On December 6, RP changed her story and talked about the struggle with her religious beliefs. It was at this time that she admitted to consensually kissing John on their third sexual encounter. She had also originally told the officer that things never progressed past digital penetration or “hand jobs” during any of their encounters, but now said she faced a pregnancy scare after their second encounter because they had attempted sexual intercourse. She also had previously said their first and second encounters were completely consensual, but now said the attempted intercourse on the second attempt was not consensual. As to their third encounter, she did not reveal that the two engaged in mutual oral sex, and described her involvement passively, including suggesting she “ended up on top of Plaintiff,” and “remained on top of him for a few minutes.”
She also told police she didn’t want John prosecuted for further investigated, yet the school went ahead anyway. Syracuse initiated the complaint against John, and investigated him using “trauma-informed” techniques. As The Daily Wire has previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/junk-science-behind-trauma-informed-investigations-ashe-schow">reported</a>, current “trauma-informed” techniques involve teaching campus investigators that evidence of lying is actually evidence of trauma, meaning there is absolutely no way an accused student can be found not responsible. As John wrote in his lawsuit, “Inconsistency in the alleged female victim’s account thereby becomes evidence that her testimony is truthful, because of alleged trauma,” while consistency in the accused male student’s account becomes “evidence that he is a premeditated and experienced sex offender.”
RP never sought trauma counseling, that Syracuse assumed she was traumatized based on its poor, unscientific, training materials.
During his hearing, John alleged in his lawsuit that Syracuse used “archaic stereotypes of male sexual desire” to determine him only “partially credible” because he admitted to his desires for RP. The hearing board found RP “credible” even though her account constantly changed. At the hearing, RP suddenly alleged for the first time she was “fearful of leaving” John’s apartment before the sexual encounter. The hearing board simply disregarded the fact that RP had originally said she had never been fearful or upset of John.
This same hearing board ignored actual evidence that John was traumatized by the encounters, including his counseling.
Naturally, John was expelled from Syracuse for sexual assault. He sued, and on Friday, Judge Brenda Sannes, an Obama appointee, denied Syracuse’s motion to dismiss John’s lawsuit. Sannes cited in her opinion the fact that Syracuse didn’t even provide John with a copy of RP’s accusations against him.
Further, and what can now be seen as a big win for opponents of so-called trauma-informed investigations, Sannes cited Syracuse training as being deficient and leading to her allowing John’s lawsuit to move forward.
“Furthermore, Plaintiff alleges that the investigation relied on ‘trauma informed techniques’ that ‘turn unreliable evidence into its opposite, such that inconsistency in the alleged female victim’s account . . . becomes evidence that her testimony is truthful,’” Sannes wrote. “Plaintiff, on the other hand, was found by the Board to be ‘lacking in credibility’ because he, inter alia, acknowledged his sexual desire for RP and acknowledged that he ‘was still ‘horny’ after she withdrew consent for kissing.’”

Regretful woman

Christian Student Regrets Sexual Encounter, Accuses Male Student Of Sexual Assault. School Uses ‘Trauma-Informed’ Training To Find Him Guilty.

A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that only half of American adults think colleges and universities are having a positive effect on our nation. The leftward political bias, held by faculty members affiliated with the Democratic Party, at most institutions of higher education explains a lot of that disappointment. Professors Mitchell Langbert and Sean Stevens document this bias in &#8220;Partisan Registration and Contributions of Faculty in Flagship Colleges.&#8221;
Langbert and Stevens conducted a new study of the political affiliation of 12,372 professors in the two leading private and two leading public colleges in 31 states. For party registration, they found a Democratic to Republican (D:R) ratio of 8.5:1, which varied by rank of institution and region. For donations to political candidates (using the Federal Election Commission database), they found a D:R ratio of 95:1, with only 22 Republican donors, compared with 2,081 Democratic donors.
Several consistent findings have emerged from Langbert and Stevens&#8217; study. The ratio of faculty who identify as or are registered as Democratic versus Republican almost always favors the Democratic Party. Democratic professors outnumber their Republican counterparts most in the humanities and social sciences, compared with the natural sciences and engineering. The ratio is 42:1 in anthropology, 27:1 in sociology and 27:1 in English. In the social sciences, Democratic registered faculty outnumber their Republican counterparts the least in economics 3:1. The partisan political slant is most extreme at the most highly rated institutions.
The leftist bias at our colleges and universities has many harmful effects. Let&#8217;s look at a few. At University of California, Davis, last month, a mathematics professor faced considerable backlash over her opposition to the requirement for faculty &#8220;diversity statements.&#8221; University of California, San Diego, requires job applicants to admit to the &#8220;barriers&#8221; preventing women and minorities from full participation in campus life. At American University, a history professor recently wrote a book in which he advocates repealing the Second Amendment. A Rutgers University professor said, &#8220;Watching the Iowa Caucus is a sickening display of the over-representation of whiteness.&#8221; University of California, Berkeley, professor and former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich chimed in to say: &#8220;Think about this: Iowa is 90.7% white. Iowa is now the only state with a lifetime voting ban for people with a felony conviction. Black people make up 4% of Iowa&#8217;s population but 26% of the prison population. How is this representative of our electorate?&#8221; A Williams College professor said he would advocate for social justice to be included in math textbooks. Students at Wayne State University no longer have to take a single math course to graduate; however, they may soon be required to take a diversity course.
Then there&#8217;s a question about loyalty to our nation. Charles Lieber, former chairman of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard, was arrested earlier this year on accusations that he made a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement about work he did for a program run by the Chinese government that seeks to lure American talent to China. He was paid $50,000 a month and up to $158,000 in living expenses for his work, which involved cultivating young teachers and students, according to court documents. According to the Department of Justice, Lieber helped China &#8220;cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China&#8217;s scientific development, economic prosperity and national security.&#8221;
It&#8217;s not just Harvard professors. Newly found court records reveal that Emory University neuroscientist Li Xiao-Jiang was fired in late 2019 after being charged with lying about his own ties to China. Li was part of the same Chinese program as Lieber. A jury found a University of California, Los Angeles, professor guilty of exporting stolen U.S. military technology to China. Newsweek reported that he was convicted June 26 on 18 federal charges. Meanwhile, NBC reported that federal prosecutors say that University of Texas professor Bo Mao attempted to steal U.S. technology by using his position as a professor to obtain access to protected circuitry and then handing it over to the Chinese telecommunications giant, Huawei.
The true tragedy is that so many Americans are blind to the fact that today&#8217;s colleges and universities pose a threat on several fronts to the well-being of our nation.
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Graduation

WILLIAMS: Political Bias And Anti-Americanism On College Campuses

Leftism

Progressivism

A group of college students who threw an off-campus coronavirus-themed party are now being investigated by their university for violating the school’s student code of conduct regarding racism.
The students, who attend the State University of New York at Albany, reportedly held a simple party, video of which was posted to the Barstool Albany Instagram account. The post has since been deleted. The video allegedly showed a bucket of Corona beers in ice and someone wearing a surgical mask. The caption for the video read, “Corona virus isn’t gonna stop anyone from partying.”
That was apparently enough to offend the Asian American Alliance, a student organization at the university, who called the party insensitive and racist, ABC7 <a href="https://abc7ny.com/5953288/">reported</a>. The Alliance posted a statement on its own Instagram account claiming the coronavirus “has led to not only mass stereotyping of Asian people, but also hundreds of deaths across the world.&#8221; The Alliance requested the university take several actions to address the alleged grievances:
<blockquote>The Dean of Student Office shall investigate this illegal student group and related UAlbany students, requiring them to delete this video and to apologize on their Instagram homepage
The Office of President shall inform all UAlbany students to stop racism and disrespectful slogans in any situation, especially coronavirus hate crime[s] against Asian students and scholars based on groundless suspicion of virus hosts. Your precaution will be essential to prevent this crime from reoccurring in New York state.
International Student and Scholar Office and Student Health Services shall take necessary actions to protect Asian students’ and scholars’ physical health and mental health.</blockquote>
Further, the Alliance said that diseases “that affect non-white populations are radicalized in a way that stems from the innate xenophobia of American society” and “serves to dehumanize the affected population.”
University officials on Thursday confirmed an investigation into the party, though the location of the party and names of the students being investigated were not released.
&#8220;The theme of this party was distasteful and hurtful and is not representative of UAlbany or its nearly 18,000 students,&#8221; university officials said. &#8220;Any allegations of conduct violations will be investigated and addressed through the University&#8217;s disciplinary process.&#8221;
WGY News Radio, who first <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/02/20/university-at-albany-students-face-heat-for-throwing-coronavirus-themed-party/">reported</a> on the investigation, said that a banner could briefly be seen in the since-deleted video that could be construed as racist.
“It’s college, where students look for any excuse to have a party. But there is also a shot of a white sheet with the word ‘virus’ and two faces. It is so quick, that if you blink, you miss it. And we missed it the first time around, and had to pause it to see more clearly. The two faces are on either side of a biohazard symbol. One has the letter X over each eye and looks like a sick face. The other is a frown, with what looks like straight lines for eyes. Is it supposed to be an Asian person with the virus? It certainly looks like it could be,” the outlet reported.
The outlet went on to suggest that the party was insensitive to those who have died but pointed out that it is not just Asian countries who are affected. The banner, however, may give validity to the complaints.

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