A while back,  Mark Bennett ripped to shreds the “suggestion” by the United States Department of Education’s  Office of Civil Rights initiative to undermine all those nasty rights and procedures that interfered with achieving the desired outcome in determining claims rape and sexual assault cases at Stanford University.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial, Stanford’s Peter Berkowitz railed against the presumption of male guilt again.

At the cost of losing federal funding—on which all major institutions of higher education have grown dependent—colleges and universities are obliged under Title IX of the Civil Rights Act (which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex) to thoroughly investigate all allegations of sexual harassment and sexual assault on campus, including the felony of rape.

OCR’s new interpretation of Title IX “strongly discourages” universities from permitting the accused “to question or cross-examine the accuser” during the hearing. In addition, if universities provide an appeals process, it must be available to both parties—which subjects the accused to double jeopardy.

Most egregiously, OCR requires universities to render judgment using “a preponderance of the evidence” standard.

One might think this effort to facilitate the “correct” outcome, by eviscerating all those nasty things that stand in the way of guilt, would worry the Academy, or at least those engaged to teach law.  Not necessarily so.

At PrawfsBlawg, Rick Hills takes up arms to explain why universities don’t need no stinkin’ rights when it comes to allegations of rape.

Peter styles the OCR’s guidance document as an “illiberal” attack on due process driven by the “dogmatism” of “postmodernists, radical feminists and critical legal studies scholars” who are “institutionalizing a presumption of guilt in sexual assault cases.”

According to Peter, these recommendations are rooted in Feminist orthodoxy that “men are controlling, angry and deceitful” and that “women neither lie nor make errors in alleging that they have been sexually assaulted.”

This sort of ad hominem posturing is exactly the sort of thing that makes contemporary politics so dreary. It causes even the best of us to ignore our deep principles as soon as our opponents embrace them, just to score points against people we generally dislike.

Smart move by Hills, given that the only thing on campus that trumps reason is the fear of being called a misogynist.  And indeed, nobody wants to be “dreary,” even if the description, though harsh, seems entirely accurate.  Rick then questions Peter’s motives:

Frankly, neither I nor Peter nor anyone else who has not spent a lot of time in university administration can have any worthwhile opinion about how much process is properly “due” in these sorts of university hearings on campus rape. As a conservative guy with a bit of a law-and-order streak and a daughter in college, I am not sure that Peter’s call for more process in these hearings is a great idea: Maybe it is more important to assure a sense of security in a close-knit community than to insure the protection of the innocent.

Really, who cares about innocence when there is a sense of security to consider?  Not the TSA. Not the OCR. Not Hills.  On a more substantive note, Hills argues that the lack of basic rights is nothing new.

But Peter cannot be serious that all of the rights appropriate for a criminal case (where the stakes are loss of life or personal liberty) ought to be imported into an administrative hearing (where the stakes are suspension or expulsion from a particular educational institution).

Hills provides a litany of matters, from public housing to immigration, where process falls a bit shy of due.  Of course, the alternative reaction is that these other, collateral civil penalties, ought to be afforded greater due process, a higher standard of proof.  Rather than bring university rape cases down to their level, they ought to raised to the higher standard? 

But then, the argument ignores an even more critical point:  If reduced standards and presumption of guilt are appropriate in an academic environment, why then does this only apply to rape and sexual assault?  Is Hills arguing that beating the crap out of somebody because you hate blacks or gays is fine with him?  OR maybe he’s good with selling drugs on campus, or stealing laptops in the library?

And what exactly is the innocent male student to say when asked why Stanford kicked him out on his butt based on rape allegation for which there was scant evidence but he was presumed guilty?  Nothing like being saddled by your college as a rapist for life for the sake of not offending feminist orthodoxy. 

But Hill’s isn’t an apologist for the Office of Civil Rights.  He contends that Berkowitz missed the really important flaw of the letter.

Take Peter’s denunciation of the OCR’s proposal, couched as a call for more protection for the accused in university “campus rape” hearings. He focuses entirely on the OCR’s motives — all that male-hating feminism — but he says nothing substantial about the actual merits of the OCR’s process. Meanwhile he ignores the one genuine flaw in OCR’s proposal that is unrelated to the alleged feminist origins of the proposal — namely, that the policy is simply too centralized.

In other words, rather than the federal government telling universities across the board what to do, Hills’ beef is that it’s should be left to each university to eviscerate rights on its own, and this is another power-grabbing federalist scheme to ram otherwise good ideas down academia’s throat.

While concern for the accused may no longer carry much sway in academia, at least we can take comfort in their resort to anti-federalist ideology in the name of imposing politically correct outcomes, not because the government tells them to, but because they want to themselves.  Small comfort.