"By Biden’s Own Standards, He Is Guilty As Charged."

Headline at the new Andrew Sullivan column (in NY Magazine). Excerpt:

Perhaps in part to atone for his shabby treatment of Anita Hill, Biden was especially prominent in the Obama administration’s overhaul of Title IX treatment of claims of sexual discrimination and harassment on campus. You can listen to Biden’s strident speeches and rhetoric on this question and find not a single smidgen of concern with the rights of the accused. Men in college were to be regarded as guilty before being proven innocent, and stripped of basic rights in their self-defense....

In 2014, the Obama administration issued another guidance for colleges which expanded what “sexual violence” could include, citing “a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient and include remarks about physical appearance; persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient; unwanted touching; and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.” By that standard, ignoring the Reade allegation entirely, Joe Biden has been practicing “sexual violence” for decades: constantly touching women without their prior consent, ruffling and smelling their hair, making comments about their attractiveness, coming up from behind to touch their back or neck. You can see him do it on tape, on countless occasions.

Of course, his argument about all of that is that it wasn't sexual. Who thinks that hair smelling and neck nuzzling was a sexual advance on all those little girls (even if it always was on girls and not boys)?

He did not stop in 2014, to abide by the standards he was all too willing to impose on college kids. A vice-president could do these things with impunity; a college sophomore could have his life ruined for an inept remark.

Biden is now claiming simply that he never did what Tara Reade said he did. Let’s posit that he didn’t. Too bad.... By Biden’s own standards, he’s guilty as charged. He never got affirmative consent from Reade, and she feels and believes he assaulted her.

He says the entire incident didn't occur. There was no gym-bag-in-the-corridor encounter at all. Or... was there? Did Mika nail that down or not??

He never got affirmative consent for countless handsy moves over the decades that unsettled some of the recipients of such affection. End of story. By Biden’s own logic, it is irrelevant that he didn’t mean to harm or discomfit anyone, that Reade’s story may have changed over time, that she might have mixed motives, that she has a record of erratic behavior, a bizarre love for Vladimir Putin, and a stated preference for Bernie Sanders, who was Biden’s chief rival. It’s irrelevant that she appeared to tweet that she would wait to launch her accusations against Biden until the timing was right. And her cause has been championed by the Bernie brigade. The many red flags and question marks in her case are largely irrelevant under Biden’s own campus standards....

Bottom line: "I’ll vote for him anyway, because Trump."

"The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities"...

... is the title of the new book by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor (who co-authored "Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case").

They talk about the new book here (at Volokh Conspiracy):

Despite horror stories like the one at Amherst, the mainstream media has poorly covered the campus sexual assault issue. There has been a handful of good work (most notably this Emily Yoffe article in Slate). More typical, however, has been the approach of the New York Times, which has virtually ignored concerns expressed by civil libertarian organizations and cohorts of law professors about the campus system’s unfairness. To the contrary, in an article about Stanford the Times recently portrayed the university’s process — which uses the lowest possible standard of proof, bans direct cross-examination by accused students, and has featured panelists who have been trained to believe that is it a sign of guilt for an accused student to respond to an accusation in a “persuasive and logical” way — as unfair to accusers. The reason? The school’s one fair rule — that the three panelists must be unanimous to justify a finding of guilty....

As for the universities, the power of identity politics has generally worked in tandem with the schools’ financial self-interest in appeasing federal officials who have the power to exact huge financial penalties to incubate unfairness toward accused students....

I immediately downloaded this book to my Kindle because — after writing the previous post about massive donations to the ACLU — I wanted to see where the organization stands on due process in campus sexual assault cases. I'm interested in the ACLU's vigor in disappointing donors who suddenly love the organization because of one issue. I highlighted free speech in my post, but I'd also wanted to say something about this due process problem, and my casual Googling had not turned up a clear answer.

There's not much about the ACLU in this book. This is the main reference:

[D]uring George W. Bush’s presidency, a handful of cases (at the University of Georgia, the University of Colorado, and Arizona State University) involving highly credible sexual assault allegations against college football and basketball players kept the issue in the public eye. In each case, the accuser filed a Title IX lawsuit against her school, alleging that it had knowingly recruited potentially violent felons solely because they were talented athletes and it had thereby shown deliberate indifference to the well-being of female students. Each case ended with a denial of the university’s motion to dismiss, followed by a settlement, driven by a hailstorm of negative publicity, in which the university apologized for not doing enough to protect women on campus. The American Civil Liberties Union filed amicus briefs supporting the Arizona State and Colorado plaintiffs.

The White House task force report on campus sexual assaults "reflects a presumption of guilt in sexual assault cases that practically obliterates the due process rights of the accused."

Writes Wendy Kaminer, noting that the report titled "Not Alone" would be more aptly named "Believe the Victim":

Students leveling accusations of assault are automatically described as “survivors” or “victims” (not alleged victims or complaining witnesses), implying that their accusations are true.

When you categorically presume the good faith, infallible memories and entirely objective perspectives of self-identified victims, you dispense with the need for cumbersome judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings and an adversary model of justice. Thus the task force effectively prohibits cross-examination of complaining witnesses: “The parties should not be allowed to cross-examine each other,” the report advises, denying the fundamental right to confront your accuser.

Much more at the link. There's also "The White House Flunks a Test on Sexual Assault/An administration task force ignores the rights of the accused," by Matt Kaiser and Justin Dillon in The Wall Street Journal, which is written in blander terms. ("Being a victim of a sexual assault is a horrible, life-altering thing. So, too, is being falsely found to have committed a sexual assault. Schools need processes that are fair to both accusers and the accused.") In less bland terms, there's KC Johnson's "The White House Joins the War on Men."

Why is this called "The Anti-Male Craziness at Yale"?

KC Johnson attacks Yale University's regulation of sex, which might be crazy, but I don't see the justification for calling it "anti-male."

This week the university produced a document... which tried to explain its approach.... The document listed eight "scenarios" that fit under the university's extraordinarily broad conception of "non-consensual sex."

Johnson highlights only one of Yale's fictional scenarios:

"Morgan and Kai are friends who begin dancing and kissing at a party. They are both drunk, although not to the point of incapacitation. Together they decide to go to Kai's room. They undress each other and begin touching each other. Morgan moves as if to engage in oral sex and looks up at Kai questioningly. Kai nods in agreement and Morgan proceeds. Subsequently, without pausing to check for further agreement, Kai begins to perform oral sex on Morgan. Morgan lies still for a few minutes, then moves away, saying it is late and they should sleep."

According to Yale, "Kai" is a guilty of having had nonconsensual sex, a term that most people would consider to be rape. 

Note to Johnson: The statutes in my state use the terms "sexual contact" and "sexual intercourse" (not "rape") and "sexual intercourse" includes cunnilingus and fellatio. [ADDED: Statutes defining crimes.]

But quite aside from that, what's with "anti-male"? I have absolutely no idea whether Morgan and Kai are 2 men, 2 women, or a man and a woman. And if they're a man and a woman, I can't tell if Morgan's the man and Kai is the woman or Kai is the man and Morgan is the woman. I think Yale's fiction writers are deliberately making the sex of these 2 characters inscrutable, which makes the scenario damned hard to visualize.

I am concerned about the due process problems in the way universities enforce their sex codes as they bumble along trying to make the campus climate welcoming for everybody, but I'm drawn toward pitying whoever got the assignment to write those scenarios. Pitying and laughing at. Imagine needing to describe explicit sex that is utterly not titillating and duly instructive.  Morgan moves as if to engage in oral sex and looks up at Kai questioningly. It's up to you to picture that move and that look. Later, Morgan fails to look and Kai moves. Or Kai fails to look and Morgan moves. Who are these people? What are they doing?!

Sara Goldrick-Rab imposes a racial critique on last week's affirmative-action protest at the Doubletree Hotel.

Remember last Tuesday: Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity had a press conference to announce 2 studies that, he said, showed the University of Wisconsin—Madison has engaged in "severe racial discrimination." A protest took place. Peter Wood, at the Chronicle of Higher Education, writes:

The fracas was covered by the local newspapers and television; featured on The O’Reilly Factor as part of an interview with CEO chairman Linda Chavez; written about by several essayists; and subject to considerably blogging, notably by University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse and Brooklyn College history professor KC Johnson. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds linked to the story, which is now widely known though, interestingly, it was not covered by The New York Times, or other major news outlets....

There's been a lot of writing the last few days about what really happened, and Wood puts together this account:

The press conference was held at 11:00. By then, word had already reached the organizers of the event that a group was planning a disruptive protest. They alerted the hotel, which closed its front doors as well as the doors of the conference room and posted staff to guard them. The protestors gathered outside the hotel where they remained for a period chanting slogans. One of their number, however, sneaked into the building through the kitchen and made his way to the hotel entrance, where he opened the front doors from inside. The protesters surged into the lobby.

At that point their chanting became audible in the conference room but wasn’t loud enough to disrupt the closed-door proceedings. At about 11:45, however, someone opened the doors to the conference and the sound of the chants drowned out attendees who were trying to ask questions.

Roger Clegg at that point had finished the formal part of the press conference and was talking with some students who had attended it. But just as the event was adjourning, the students outside pushed past the hotel staff, some of whom were thrown to the ground. The mob poured into the room, and Clegg, accompanied by University of Wisconsin Professor Lee Hansen and two members of the hotel staff, struggled through it to the exit, and, accompanied by protestors, to the hotel elevator. Several of the protestors prevented the elevator doors from closing until the two hotel staff members pushed them back.

Wood relied on various eyewitnesses, but I want to concentrate on this blog post by eyewitness Sara Goldrick-Rab, a UW—Madison professor. Goldrick-Rab seeks to enlighten us about how race affects "how we understand and interpret" the incident, in which — her words — "a large group of mostly brown folks came into contact with a much smaller group of mostly white folks and it freaked out some of those the white folks."

Go to the link to read her full description on the incident. Here's the part where she employs self-critique presumably to teach us all about how race (and gender) influence perception and interpretation:

I admit it: there was a fraction of a second in that lobby, when I saw the people run by and I heard the loud sound, that I experienced fear. At first, I thought it was surprise. Then I realized that I had caught myself anticipating violence and momentarily panicking as I saw men of color move fast and loud. I recognized it, I checked it, and I questioned it. I was angry with myself... And it took me no more than 30 seconds to chastise myself for it, get over it, and then experience the protest as it really was: peaceful, bold, and uplifting.

I had experienced another moment of fear not 30 minutes earlier, when I watched Clegg address a young African-American woman, responding to her question about his report with a smug, paternalistic smile that to me conveyed absolutely no understanding of the powerful hand he had in intimidating her. I reacted to him, in that moment, as a white man with no sense of his own privilege. It was the whiteness of his skin combined with the Southern in his voice and his hyper-masculine demeanor that made my hands shake. I was afraid of his evidently barely-repressed disdain for this woman. The Jewish ancestry in me felt it to my toes.

Somehow, Goldrick-Rab refrains from chastising herself for seeing Clegg through the lens of his Southern white maleness. She doesn't catch herself mid-emotion and rethink her way to a more charitable interpretation. Quite the opposite! Clegg's smile gets a negative interpretation. She has a physical reaction that runs down into her fingers and toes, she says. She attributes the loathing of Clegg to an ethnic memory born into her body, and she does not stop and question that prejudice either within 30 seconds of feeling it or a week later writing about it.

And yet Goldrick-Rab calls us to "come clean" and "admit that we are race conscious every day."

What distinguishes us from the racists is our honesty, candor, and willingness to learn. Race matters. And that's why the Doubletree event was no "disruption" but rather a necessary protest against an antagonistic deliberate transgression of outsiders on a community.

What? It wasn't a disruption because it was necessary? How does the perceived necessity of opposing someone's press conference make what happened not a disruption? Why not just say: I can't stand what the speaker was saying so I'm glad he was disrupted? Perhaps because you think that would sound badly antagonistic to free speech. But if you care about speech — and honesty and candor — don't redefine words. Speak clearly and straightforwardly.

As for the phrase "an antagonistic deliberate transgression of outsiders on a community." Wow. Just take that out of context and look at it with honesty and candor and willingness to learn. It's blatantly xenophobic and closed-minded. You don't want to hear an opposing viewpoint. Someone who criticizes the university's admissions policy is an outsider trangressing on the community?! So... what? The community is right to defend itself, physically, against the evil intruder? Step back and contemplate that, since you are inclined toward self-critique. That attitude is reminiscent of what historical analogues?

Are those toes tingling at all?