TL;DR, a student who looks like the rapist of another student (who isn’t the actual rapist, just looks like him) is banned from parts of campus where the other student is.
Thought on this?
The administration of this college has shown that it has lost all reason, all common sense. If I were this man, I’d transfer ASAP. What a load of BS.
It is truly sad that the woman is so obviously traumatized by her rape. However, this is not the fault of the male student, and for him to be punished in this way is absolutely terrible. He did nothing wrong and his personal life was examined under a microscope for resembling a guy across the country? Did she think he was her rapist’s even eviler twin?
What was the college thinking even opening an investigations into this guy? And why is he still being punished?
Perhaps this young woman is not ready to attend college if she needs such accommodations and invasions into the privacy of other students to feel “safe”?
If the facts are as reported then the university is patently ridiculous and I would think the boy would have legal standing to proceed against the school.
But the linked article is quite sparse and does not name the university or the outcome of the matter. Is there the possibility perhaps that the girl saw him and actually mistook him for her rapist and thus reported it to the school? Then until they could sort things out they had him stay away? It is really hard to fathom a university proceeding in this manner unless they are totally clueless about individual rights.
this is crazy. You can’t limit the rights of one student just because he/she looks like someone who committed a crime against another student.
I find this story pretty much impossible to believe. As HarvestMoon suggests, perhaps the real story is that the woman thought the guy actually WAS the person who allegedly raped her, and it took time to show this wasn’t the case. Or perhaps there is more to it in general.
Even if it was as Hunt and HarvestMoon suggest (thinking it actually was the guy, had to prove otherwise), shouldn’t all restrictions have been dropped after he was cleared?
I agree, has to be more to it.
There’s absolutely no substantiation that the incidents ever took place. I consider the story false until proved true.
Well its on Fox News. It MUST be true.
Hard to believe this isn’t satire. Where is Stephen Colbert these days?
This was a commentary piece in a non-peer-reviewed publication (albeit an elite one). The editors of the piece are law students, not journalists – and we’ve seen lately that professional journalists are pretty fallible when it comes to taking anonymous stories at face value. There’s nothing to talk about here, based on the only source we have.
There is an excellent quote in this Harvard Law review article, I don’t want to believe that a school placed restrictions on a student simply because they “looked” like a guy some woman accused of rape, but given all the crazy stuff this year I think I believe that it could have happened.
http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/02/trading-the-megaphone-for-the-gavel-in-title-ix-enforcement-2/
this quote which is just one tiny piece of the above article is in reference to the Hobart William Smith Case where they university was unable to identify the students that allegedly raped a young woman.
I doubt if the staff of the law review would fact-check something like that.
Which school?
I’ll take her credibility and insight over 90% + of professional journalists.
The National Review piece was, as noted, excerpted from a thoughtful piece by Harvard law professor Janet Halley commenting on colleges’ competence to adjudicate felony sexual assault. Again, as noted, Halley is a highly credible source. Her comments do beg the question that: WHAT was the college thinking?
We need some investigative journalism here. There aren’t that many small liberal arts colleges in Oregon!
I’m skeptical. The original article is light on details and is told solely from the perspective of the student (second-hand, through the professor who assisted him). Given what we currently know about the ways in which colleges handle sexual assault, I’m skeptical that a particular college would give a no-contact order to a student who merely looked like another person. I’ve worked on no-contact orders before and there’s usually more than meets the eye - although of course the college isn’t always able to divulge all of the details of the situation.
Given Prof. Halley’s in the academic and legal communities, I think she would be careful to accurately portray the details, but I do agree that there must be more to the story.
The owner of private property generally has the right to impose constraints.
As another poster said - there aren’t many LACs in Oregon and even fewer that a person would travel across the country for. Of course if true this is absurd, but given the publication and lack of details I wouldn’t take it at face value. It is most likely Reed and Lewis and Clark would be a distant runner up. It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to do a bit of leg work and address it as a journalism piece rather than, “someone told me that at a place across the country in the woods this happened.”