By Professor Doom
I feel like having an easy day, so once again I’ll discuss the demented kangaroo campus court system. Quirks in how universities are created give them surprising leeway regarding disputes on campus. Their policy documents were established decades ago, when academics ran campuses, and so the system was set up to have disputes,scholarly disputes, settled by scholars.
The administrative takeover of higher ed not only allowed admin to award themselves ridiculous pay and benefits, they incidentally took control of what has become a quasi-legal system. Scholarship has drained away from many campuses, and so this legal system now spends more time dealing with things that, frankly, are out of the purview of most academics…and absolutely beyond the ken of a typical higher education administrator.
I know, considering all the other ridiculous kangaroo rulings I’ve discussed in this blog, one more is just piling on, but this one is just so over the top:
Now, at first glance, one might figure “oh, she accused him, then recanted her testimony.” That is the sort of thing that can cause a miscarriage of justice but, no, it’s nothing so reasonable:
Colorado State University-Pueblo suspended a male athlete for years after he was found responsible for sexually assaulting a female trainer. But the trainer never accused him of wrongdoing, and said repeatedly that their relationship was consensual. She even stated, unambiguously, “I’m fine and I wasn’t raped.”
Curious, eh? She never complained about rape, so how the heck did this case even make it before the laughable campus court system? Well, the poor guy left a hickey on his girlfriend. Someone noticed:
The hickey was indeed noticed by another trainer, described as the “Complainant” in the lawsuit. When confronted, Doe confessed to the Complainant that she and Dean had engaged in sex. According to the lawsuit, the Complainant “presumed” this sex was nonconsensual, and reported it to the director of the athletic training program.
And, just like that, the poor guy’s life is messed up. I know it’s bizarre, but the same system too blind to see 10 years of weird activities at Penn Sate, too deaf to listen to eyewitness testimony to what was going on in the showers there can nevertheless see evidence of rape, even hear a cry of rape, even when there’s nothing to see, nothing to hear.
To be fair, there’s a policy against athletes and trainers getting involved, so we do have a policy violation here. Informed of the policy, the guy breaks off the relationship. Alas, the girlfriend sends him a Snapchat after the breakup.
The guy asks admin what to do about the Snapchat. Admin, eager for blood, tells the guy to read the text and send the administrator a copy. Oops, the poor kid listened to admin:
“…you could be potentially be [sic] in complication with your no contact order for opening the snapchats that she sent you,”…
In other words, the man in charge of investigating whether Neal had raped a woman—a woman who emphatically stated that Neal had not done so—first told Neal to open emails from his girlfriend, and later told him he could be disciplined for opening them.”
It’s game over past this point. The kid is railroaded through the kangaroo system, his scholarship removed, he’s expelled…and he can’t even transfer to another school because he’s “guilty” of sexual misconduct. No other school would dare take responsibility for letting this “sexual predator” on campus, regardless of the circumstances.
A laughable investigation (for campuses, this phrase is as redundant as “tiny shrimp”) ensues, and a report is compiled:
“…submitted his report to Jennifer DeLuna, CSU-Pueblo’s director of diversity and inclusion. Neal was given just 24 hours to make himself available to appear before DeLuna. This meeting was, in Neal’s view, a “sham.”
“It wasn’t actually a hearing at all,” says Neal. “I was allowed to have legal counsel there if I wanted to, but the legal counsel wasn’t allowed to counsel.”
—note that the administrative title, “CSU-Pueblo director of diversity and inclusion,” is twice as long as the title-holder’s name, so once again we’ve found another administrative position that can be eliminated with no impact on education and research.
So, this “CSU-Pueblo director of diversity and inclusion” looked at the evidence collected by another admin out for blood and convicts. Neat, eh?
Now the kangaroo system has an appeals process. I’ve had personal experience with the appeals process when I was at a fake community college. The way how the appeal works is you appeal your case using the exact same information to the exact same people who ruled against you in the first place. It doesn’t have to be that way, but admin can do whatever they want.
Anyway, in a non-kangaroo system, a second set of judges might go “Hey, nobody is saying the kid committed rape, at worst there’s a policy violation here, between two students. Seeing as there’s no crime, we should mete out a more reasonable punishment than destroying his life.”
The poor kid can’t even conceive of how rigged this system is. The fool makes a good faith appeal, thinking it’ll make any difference. How did that appeal work out?
Neal appealed the decision. His appeal was denied.
Yeah, no kidding. In decades of higher ed, I’ve never seen an appeal go against administrative wishes. Wonder why that is? Oh yeah, that’s right, it’s a completely rigged system.
Finally understanding there’s no way to get justice, or even a modicum of reason in the campus kangaroo system, he’s suing the school for what they did to him. Even more fantastically, he’s suing the Education Department for their hand in how they set up Title IX, putting him into a kangaroo system that should not have the power to destroy lives over policy violations.
As I’ve detailed a time or two in this blog, those wronged by the kangaroo campus court system usually have a much easier time finding justice in our “official” justice system, despite the latter’s well-deserved poor reputation. It’s still far superior to the thoroughly corrupt system our campuses use.
I’ll wish the kid luck, though I suspect he won’t need it. Most likely, they’ll settle out of court for a few million, and no admission of wrongdoing. The taxpayers will pay for that, and no administrator will lose his job. Then CSU will hire another $150,000 a year administrator (proposed title: Assistant Pro-Vice Director of Campus Victimless Noncrime Reduction And Diversity) to see that it won’t happen again…they’ll have to raise tuition anther few percent to cover the expense of this as well.
