Nay or yay?
I would oppose this. As I’ve said, colleges do have a role in regulating student behavior of all sorts. My problem has been that college procedures and punishments were too much like criminal proceedin
proceedings without adequate protections for the accused. This goes too far in the other direction.
From the Washington Post: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/07/29/do-students-get-a-fair-hearing-an-effort-to-change-how-colleges-handle-sexual-assaults/
I think the Huffington post is already putting alot of spin on this.
Oh please, are you SERIOUS?!??!?
NO investigation, but you can require the “accused” to stay away from the “accuser”? That is guilty until proven innocent, but you don’t even try to prove innocence!
Requiring lawyers at their own expense, that’s just great. Someone getting lots of FA will not report for fear of having to drop out of college.
Why not come back to the idea that a college is a company, and companies should not do their own policing of employees. If your bookkeeper rapes your administrative assistant, and the latter tells you, as a manager, do you say “oh, well we can handle this ourselves, no need to tell the police”?
I don’t know why common sense goes out the window on these threads. Rape is a crime. Crimes must involve the police.
If a victim does NOT want to report to the police, they should have the option to report to a victim’s organization for counseling and help, including talking about the ramifications of not reporting to the police. The options shouldn’t be don’t report at all, or report to the college only, or report to the police only.
I fear for my children at college if this trend of “campus rape is a college problem not a law enforcement problem” continues, and I have children of both genders.
Again, can you imagine being a young 20-something in your first job, and you go out with another employee and are subject to sexual assault, so you decide to handle it by reporting it to your manager? Or if you live in an apartment house, do you report a sexual assault to your landlord, if the perpetrator also lives there?
We don’t send our kids to college to curtail their rights. And a crime is still a crime no matter where it takes place and who is involved.
Such a protection for the accuser would be a penalty against the accused, so the campus officials would either have to do its own investigation, or rely on the judgement of police and courts, in order to determine whether applying the penalty is justified. Otherwise, the campus officials could get it wrong much of the time, much as they are accused of doing today.
“Sorry Bob, but someone (and you know it is Sally) said you raped them, but doesn’t want to press charges, so we didn’t investigate and of course the police aren’t involved, but anyway, she’s a bio major and you’re a bio major, and you can’t take the same classes or be within 100 feet of each other.”
“I’m sure you and your parents will understand.”
Of the elements listed above, I agree with 2 and 3, but 1 and 4 sort of fly in the face of the issues surrounding campus-investigated cases that the new bill is trying to fix - the inconsistency in the standard of proof applied by universities in certain cases. In my mind, if it is truly a rape, that is a felony and the police and judicial infrastructure should always be involved - Universities are not equipped to investigate and prosecute felonies. In most cases, this also ensures that the accused will be provided with the proper due process, and that the accuser actually has to have evidence to make a case. When we are talking about something as grave as a rape, with dire consequences for the accused if found guilty, I don’t see any other way around it.
This is already happening, but once the case is completed, the school most likely wouldn’t force this to happen. But you’d think the two parties would stay away from each other. As a college student, I don’t think this is a big deal. If people want to get a restraining order, they always can.
In America everybody has the right to legal defence even if they cannot afford it. This is also how the entire system works. Everybody has the right to legal defence, why should this be different?
I basically agree with the rest of this though
And yet the perennial defenders of Greek life continue to wonder why Fraternities have a bad rap?
THIS proposal is a perfect example of the reason!
These national organizations cant see the forest for the trees… 8-|
Absolutely unbelievable… 
The wording and details could be a bit better, but I generally agree with what looks to be the goal of the bill. Get the college administration out of law enforcement. Provide all the support to the victims that they need, but for any action taken against the perp, that’s for the cops. As someone above said, would you call your landlord? Nope, you would call the cops, and call other organization for support.
Before someone thinks I am siding with the greek system, my view is that the court system has real, life changing consequences that go far beyond what the school can do which at most is kicking someone out. Using the greek system only as an example, which would be more significant to them - something goes horribly wrong at a party and one of two things happen 1)the cops show up, or 2)an assistant dean shows up. I’d take the dean any day over the cops.
What is wrong with due process and wanting to get the justice system involved with criminal cases?
^^here we go…
nice
Fraternities want to protect rapists, because of course they do. A frat guy rapes.a woman, and she can’t bring herself to face hostile disbelieving cops, so of course the fraternities think that the rapist should have no consequence whatsoever.
Have the fraternities given a thought to the optics of this? Is “We stand for rapists!” really the image they want to project? Many people already believe that fraternities are pro-rape, but do they want to confirm this?
What is wrong with it is that it makes the same mistake that’s currently being made, only at the other extreme. Colleges need to be able to handle all kinds of misbehavior, including drugs and alcohol, noise, plagiarism, sexual misbehavior, and many others, because they are managing a community. Some of these things are ALSO crimes, but that doesn’t mean the college shouldn’t have any involvement. Do you really want the college calling the actual police every time there is a case of underage drinking? I sure don’t.
This proposal, if the Post’s summary is correct, seems to be designed to make all sides angry.
First of all, colleges aren’t like companies in that in loco parentis isn’t completely dead.
Also, any company I know of does police their own employees, and it’s completely legal and accepted for companies to take disciplinary action against employees for actions that are not substantiated by criminal investigation.
As much as I am an advocate of going to the cops rather than the U for rape reports, I can think of plenty of reasons why one wouldn’t. Let’s think of how survivors are treated as suspects, over a decade of backlogged rape kits, etc etc and it’s not hard to see why one wouldn’t want to go to the cops.
I’m adamantly against any more barriers for rape survivors than there already are.
How can requiring the police be a mistake? The 95% of the population that is not attending college lives within the criminal justice system. I could see some allowance given for managing on campus housing, same as a landlord could put provisions in a lease. This would address the “victimless crimes” (I hate that term) so the school could just boot you from the dorm for things like underage drinking and not necessarily call the cops every single time.
Like most things the conceptual and the actual practice on the ground, vary a whole lot…I cannot see institutions like HYPSM just handing all this over, and its one of the reasons, they have their own sworn-in public safety officers.