ASHE SCHOW: Colleges can’t win when it comes to campus sexual assault complaints.
It doesn’t seem to matter what a college does when responding to a sexual assault accusation — they are always wrong. That’s according to the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which investigates colleges and universities for alleged Title IX violations.
In a recent ruling against Michigan State University, OCR determined the school had violated Title IX because it took too long — four days — to remove accused students from their dorms. The fact that the students weren’t immediately evicted from campus, even though an investigation hadn’t even started, was also evidence of a violation.
OCR looked at two complaints, from students identified as Student A and Student B, to determine MSU was in violation of Title IX. While OCR mostly found “insufficient evidence” to support the complaints of the two students, what the agency found the university in violation of seemed like nitpicking.
“OCR also determined that the University failed to provide a prompt and equitable response to complaints filed by Student A and Student B, as Title IX requires,” wrote Meena Morey Chandra, a regional OCR director. . . .
Despite the MSU accuser not filing a formal complaint with the university against the two accused students (which would have been required to remove the students from their dorms) the university moved the students.
So, to the OCR, a university that received word of a sexual assault — even if it wasn’t provided in a formal complaint — must immediately upend the accused student’s life and then begin an investigation. Guilty until proven innocent indeed.
Speaking of innocence, both MSU’s outside investigator and OCR determined that there was not even a preponderance of evidence to suggest the alleged sexual assault had occurred. (By the way, some of the evidence that was favorable to the accused students was deemed “inappropriate” to OCR, but it still determined the sexual assault likely didn’t happen.)
Yet despite this, the university was still in the wrong, according to OCR. The university should have immediately opened an investigation into the matter even though the accuser did not want one. This is how the school failed to provide a “prompt and equitable response.”
How about we just defund OCR, and provide that all sexual assault investigations should be turned over to the police?