Feminist for Free Expression recently wrote a letter to Alan Stone, vice president of public affairs at Columbia University, to protest Columbia’s controversial new sexual harassment policy.

The letter complains that the new disciplinary procedures for sexual harassment complaints, “infantilize students by streamlining away both the protection for the accused and the accountability of the accuser, as the juvenile justice system routinely did to “protect” children before In Re Gault.”

Such infantilization is taken to an extreme by Columbia’s odd definition of lack of consent.

The inference of lack of consent when the accused “should have been aware” of “mental . . . impairment or incapacity” opens the door to a wide variety of potentially spurious accusations against which defense might be difficult. Such a red flag should be countered by a rigorous attention to fundamental precepts of due process, but it is not.

FFE also strenuously objects the Star Chamber aspects of the new policy, wherein the accused is not allowed to confront the accuser, nor have an attorney, parent, or other third party present, nor even be notified of the disciplinary proceeding until just before it occurs.

This policy, by isolating the parties from each other and enforcing secrecy, attempts to combine a disciplinary procedure with therapeutic consideration of “the emotional needs of individuals who have experienced sexual misconduct.” However, since charges are real and potential penalties are real, therapeutic considerations should be dealt with independently, not entwined in a fact-finding hearing with the resulting failure of a full and fair and recorded hearing of the charges.

Sexual attacks should certainly be punished. But it is no service to women to hold that offenses against them require a kangaroo court.

A very succinct summary of the problems with Columbia’s policy.

Meanwhile civil libertarian Nat Hentoff points out in a Village Voice column that in March 1999 Columbia’s own Columbia Law Review published a definitive study of private and public college disciplinary procedures. The study was co-authored by Columbia Law School professors Vivian and Curtis Berger. Hentoff interviewed Vivian Berger and writes,

In her comments to me, Vivian Berger emphasizes the [Columbia] policy’s denial of the accused student’s right to confront and cross-examine the accuser and the accuser’s witnesses. She also criticizes the denial of the right to have an attorney present, even during an appeal. Appeals are solely by the dean, who, as the policy states, “relies upon the written record and does not conduct a new factual investigation.”

Since the dean doesn’t investigate further, how can the accused bring forth new evidence? And since there has been no-cross examination of his accuser and her witnesses, what kind of a fair, complete written record can the dean rely on to be just in the appellate process.”

Leave it to a major American university to create a disciplinary policy reminiscent of legal proceedings in some third-rate authoritarian dictatorship.

Sources:

Feminists for Free Expression letter to Alan J. Stone. Joan Kennedy Taylor for the Board of Directors of FFE, Letter, November 16, 2000.

How Columbia can save itself?. Nat Hentoff, The Village Voice, November 22-28, 2000.