Unquestioned acceptance of a baseless claim never flies in academia, and yet universities around the nation — the faces of higher education — have modified the laws of the criminal justice system to favor a lower standard of evidence from which to draw conclusions.
As demanded in a 2011 modification of Title IX, universities had to reach verdicts on sexual assault allegations based on the “preponderance of evidence” standard, contrary to the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard required in the criminal justice system. In 2017, U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos extended schools the choice to adopt the preponderance of evidence standard or the “clear and convincing” standard, a higher standard, to reach verdicts.
According to the statistical analysis of political scientist and UCLA professor, John Villasenor, an innocent defendant charged with sexual assault is an alarming five times more likely to be charged as guilty under the preponderance of evidence standard than under the beyond a reasonable doubt standard. Villasenor also found that if the criminal justice system adopted the preponderance of evidence standard, innocent defendants would likely face false conviction rates of up to 33 percent, a drastic increase from the current unsettling figure of about 12 percent.
Sexual assault is traumatizing and delicate to address. However, whether it is in the court of law or the court of public opinion, reactionaries must not act on emotional impulses. Sufficient evidence is the most critical component of the American justice system, and justice is a codified value within the American identity. Why doesn’t university culture reflect this?
College campuses are entities governed by powerful, unelected, self-assured scholars that all too often a notion of intellectual entitlement. They regularly value categories over individuals, quotas over credentials, donors over indebted students and claim over evidential truth. Universities have become power hungry laboratories of anti-democracy, and this attitude has permeated into policies, even those as sacred as Title IX.
If all women are honest, what are all men? What, then, are all brunettes? All tall people? All of anything does not exist, and it is precisely this stereotyping behind the anti-democratic legal loopholes that historically disadvantaged women and minorities. At universities, the presumption of character is now employed as legitimate evidence, a practice that social justice advocates worked hard to reverse.
The next fight for women seems to be one that is currently being undermined by champions of the modern-day Title IX revision: the right for each individual to be judged by his or her own, personal moral integrity. If universities truly strive to prepare young Americans for the real world, they cannot continue to operate under a softened rule of law that allows for categorical discrimination under the guise of social justice. When the truth can no longer be separated from slander — that is the end of democracy.
