Let's tell Donald Trump to dismantle Dear Colleague

I was at the Community Of The Wrongly Accused or COTWA and I was reading how Donald Trump is going to dismantle the Office of Civil Rights division of the Department Of Education. A lot of publications and organizations are bringing this to the forefront. Among them are Inside Higher Ed,Weekly Standard,Buzz Feed and Vox. This is a good thing if you are an MRA or you actually care about due process for the accused. I thank them for bring these issues to the forefront so the rest of country and planet can see what goes on at America's Universities and Colleges. Contacting Senators Lamar Alexander and James Lankford was a good idea. They are pressing on this with the tenacity of a pit bull. Congress has the power to yank the DOE's funding and with the Republicans running Congress that is a safe bet. Donald Trump has a Twitter account so let's contact him there and let him know what we think on this subject.

Tell your college alma mater and/or elected officials about victim centered investigations on college and university campuses

From SAVE Services:

A new trend called "victim-centered investigations" is troubling us at SAVE.

The gist of the new investigatory approach is to start from believing the complainant and to continue the investigation from the complainant's perspective--thus ending the police's role as neutral fact-finder.

Colleges are starting to look into using this technique, and we need stop it.

We are asking you to contact the university or college where you attended school, and ask them to continue implementing fair investigative procedures.

Tell them to preserve the presumption of innocence on their campus.

If you didn't attend college or do not want to contact your alma mater then contact your elected officials. Congressional Representative:click here and Senators: click here. You can also contact Senator James Lankford and Senator Lamar Alexander. Neither of the aforementioned Senators are big fans of what the Obama administration is doing to college and university men so contacting them would be a plus. On Lankford's website click on "send an email on legislation" to send him an email.

Support fairness on college and university campuses nationwide support the CEFTA

From SAVE Services:

It is now football season, but we're the 'red zone' we're talking about doesn't have to deal with an end zone.

Instead, the time between when schools start up and Thanksgiving is known as the 'red zone' because that is when the most campus sexual assaults are reported.

Help us combat campus sexual assault by telling Senator Lamar Alexander to pass our new federal bill, which will help get safety and medical authorities involved with campus sexual assault cases ASAP. A copy of our bill, called the Campus Equality, Fairness, and Transparency Act, can be found here.

Call Senator Alexander, Chair of the Senate HELP committee: (202) 224-4944.

Or email him through this form.

Tell his office to pass CEFTA this year; let's make it our goal to have the red zone only exist in football.

Due process is still being kicked off campus

Academia’s descent into perpetual hysteria and incipient tyranny is partly fueled by the fiction that 1 in 5 college students is sexually assaulted and that campuses require minute federal supervision to cure this. Encouraged by the government’s misuse of discredited social science (one survey supposedly proving this 1-in-5 fiction), colleges and universities are implementing unconstitutional procedures mandated by the government.

The 2006 Duke lacrosse rape case fit the narrative about campuses permeated by a “rape culture.” Except there was no rape. In 2014, the University of Virginia was convulsed by a magazine’s lurid report of a rape that buttressed the narrative that fraternities foment the sexual predation supposedly pandemic in “male supremacist” America. Except there was no rape. Now, Colorado State University at Pueblo has punished the supposed rapist of a woman who says she was not raped.

Grant Neal, a CSU Pueblo pre-med major and athlete, began a relationship with Jane Doe (as identified in Neal’s lawsuit), although she, as a student in the Athletic Training Program, was not supposed to fraternize with athletes. Jane Doe texted an invitation to Neal to come to her apartment. The following is from Neal’s complaint against CSU Pueblo:

“As the intimacy progressed, knowing that they both wanted to engage in sexual intercourse, Jane Doe advised Plaintiff that she was not on birth control. Accordingly, Plaintiff asked if he should put on a condom. Jane Doe clearly and unequivocally responded ‘yes.’ . . . They proceeded to engage in consensual sexual intercourse, during which Jane Doe . . . demonstrated her enjoyment both verbally and non-verbally.”

The next day, one of Jane Doe’s classmates, who neither witnessed nor was told of any assault, noticed a hickey on the woman’s neck. Assuming an assault must have happened, the classmate told school officials that an assault had occurred. Jane Doe told school officials the sex was consensual: “I’m fine and I wasn’t raped.” Neal’s lawsuit says she told an administrator: “Our stories are the same and he’s a good guy. He’s not a rapist, he’s not a criminal, it’s not even worth any of this hoopla!” Neal recorded on his cellphone Jane Doe saying that nothing improper had transpired, and soon the two again had intercourse.

Undeterred, CSU Pueblo mixed hearsay evidence with multiple due process violations, thereby ruining a young man’s present (he has been suspended from the school for as long as Jane Doe is there) and blighting his future (his prospects for admission to another school are bleak).

Title IX of the Education Amendments enacted in 1972 merely says no person at an institution receiving federal funds shall be subjected to discrimination on the basis of sex. From this the government has concocted a right to micromanage schools’ disciplinary procedures, mandating obvious violations of due process.

In 2011, the Education Department’s civil rights office sent “dear colleague” letters to schools directing them to convict accused persons on a mere “preponderance” of evidence rather than “clear and convincing” evidence. Schools were instructed to not allow accused students to cross-examine their accusers, but to allow accusers to appeal not-guilty verdicts, a form of double jeopardy.

Although a “dear colleague” letter is supposedly a mere “guidance document,” it employs the word “must” in effectively mandating policies. While purporting to just “interpret” Title IX, these letters shred constitutional guarantees. And the letters evade the legal requirement that such significant rulemaking must be subject to comment hearings open to a properly notified public. Even were CSU Pueblo inclined to resist such dictates — academic administrators nowadays are frequently supine when challenged — it would risk a costly investigation and the potential loss of the 11 percent of its budget that comes from Washington.

The Chronicle of Higher Education says the case raises this “intriguing” question: “What responsibility does a college have to move ahead with a third-party complaint if the supposed victim says she consented?” This question, which in a calmer time would have a self-evident answer, will be explored in Neal’s lawsuit. It should reveal what the school thought of Jane Doe’s statement exculpating Neal, who says a school official “brushed off” the recording and said that Jane Doe said what she said “just because she was scared of you.” Neal’s lawyer says he suspects that Jane Doe might now be intimating something “inappropriate” and is perhaps scared of losing her place in the Athletic Training Program.

CSU Pueblo should be scared of joining those schools that have lost lawsuits filed by students denied due process. Such suits are remedial education for educators ignorant of constitutional guarantees.

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Several distinguished law professors have spoken up protesting "Dear Colleague". "Dear Colleague" has its critics in the Senate. Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator James Lankford are not big fans of "Dear Colleague" so let's let them know. Demand that Catherine Lhamon be brought up on criminal charges.

Glenn Reynolds: The unilateral war on college men

Glenn Reynolds: The unilateral war on college men
Glenn Harlan Reynolds 11:01 a.m. EDT September 30, 2015

An assistant secretary of education thinks she can rewrite rape law by writing a letter.

It appears to many — including me — as if the Obama administration is engaged in a war on college men. Using debunked statistics, the president, the vice president and various other political officials have falsely claimed that there’s an epidemic of rape on college campuses, even though campus rape is, in fact, falling, just as off-campus rape is. (And, in fact, rape is less common on campus than off).

And, ever since the Department of Education issued a ”Dear Colleague" letter to universities in 2011, in essence ordering them to adopt new and draconian campus “sexual assault” rules that treat accusations as presumptively true and force the accused — almost always men — to prove their innocence, sometimes even very strong evidence of innocence is ignored.

Spearheading this effort has been Assistant Secretary of Education for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon, who has characterized the letter as binding on colleges and universities even though it is not a law, was not adopted as a formal or informal rule making after notice and comment under any law, and appears to have very little to do with the federal anti-discrimination law Title IX, which says only that “no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Title IX was supposed to force colleges to admit women to programs formerly reserved for men. The law says nothing about sexual assault, sexual harassment, or the duty of universities to investigate criminal behavior on their own instead of referring crimes to law enforcement. But through a period of interpretation and reinterpretation, that simple statutory language has produced reams of federal paperwork that, in effect, turn a simple academic non-discrimination rule into a rape law that lacks the due process protections and evidentiary standards of actual rape law.

Now it appears that Congress has noticed. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., crashed a Senate hearing last week to grill Deputy Assistant Secretary of Education Amy McIntosh about past statements by Lhamon that purported to establish the “guidance” letter as binding law. How could this be binding, asked Sen. Alexander, when it’s simply a letter issued without any of the procedures required for administrative rule making?

McIntosh didn’t offer much of an answer, and that’s because there isn’t one. As some, including Ari Cohn, have argued for a while, the Department of Education is acting unlawfully here.

A law, to be binding, must pass both houses of Congress and be presented to the president's desk, where it must either pass into law or be vetoed and then overridden by a two-thirds vote of each house. Because this procedure, which the framers of our Constitution designed in order to make lawmaking difficult, turns out to make it difficult to pass laws, we also allow administrative agencies to issue regulations that are binding as law. But those regulations can be issued only after a draft is published and the public has a chance to comment, via either formal or informal rule making.

A mere letter from a bureaucrat, which is all the “Dear Colleague” letter is, has no binding authority. At most, it suggests that the bureaucrats might be willing to go to court to try to convince a judge that their interpretation of the statute is correct.

So why did colleges roll over? Law blogger Scott Greenfield suggests that it’s because the colleges are also warring against college men: “After all, why should a college risk the loss of its lifeblood (federal money) for the sake of protecting a few guys, particularly when the colleges pretty much agree with Lhamon’s progressive ideals?”

Greenfield notes that once Columbia University was sued by a male student claiming that his Title IX rights were violated because of the university’s response to a false accusation, it changed its mind and decided that Title IX didn’t create much in the way of student rights after all. Greenfield concludes: “Regardless of whether one embraces the policy choice embodied in Lhamon’s ‘Dear Colleague’ letters or not, there is no doubt but that it was imposed without lawful authority and adopted by schools who chose to sacrifice one segment of their student population to appease another segment. This is not the law. This is not what Title IX mandates. And they know it, even if you don’t.”

Greenfield is right. It’s nice that members of Congress are taking notice. But male college students and their parents, as well as alumni and trustees — and those women noticing that there’s a shortage of college-educated men all of a sudden — need to ask why there’s a war on college men, and why colleges, seemingly, are on the other side.


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Thank you Senator Lamar Alexander

Let's thank Senator Alexander for standing up to the Department of Education and for standing up to the abuses of the Civil Rights division of the Department of Education. His contact info is here.