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Betsy DeVos is getting savaged for closing campus kangaroo courts
[NYPOST] judicial process that doesn’t allow the accused to cross-examine his accuser or reliably see the evidence against him is a civil libertarian’s nightmare. It traduces every principle of fairness and is blatantly un-American.Yet Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is about to get savaged for replacing just such a process with something more in keeping with our longstanding legal norms. The Education Department is preparing new rules that would roll back the monstrously unfair Obama-era requirements for how colleges handle sexual-assault and harassment allegations. It will be a significant advance for due process, which is almost as out of style on campus as free speech. In one of its least defensible actions, the B.O. regime used its Office for Civil Rights to impose its preferred procedures for handling sexual-assault cases on all the universities in the country that receive federal funds. It did it via a 19-page "Dear Colleague" letter, in the name of Title IX, the provision in federal law prohibiting sexual discrimination in education. The process was terrible. It blew right by the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires public notice and comment before such rules go into effect. And the substance was worse. If the letter reads as if it was written by inflamed activists who had no interest in balanced proceedings, that’s because it was. It required colleges to adopt a "preponderance of evidence" standard rather than a "clear and convincing" standard. Posted by: Fred 2018-09-02 |
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