Stuart Taylor, Jr. – Author of The Campus Rape Frenzy

The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities

 

Washington, DC—A decade after three Duke lacrosse teammates wrongfully accused of rape were declared innocent, America’s universities have been gripped by a politicized campus rape panic that now threatens our nation’s commitment to civil liberties and fundamental due-process rights.

 

In THE CAMPUS RAPE FRENZY (Encounter Books, January 24, 2017), nationally acclaimed journalist Stuart Taylor, Jr. and professor KC Johnson expose the perilous assault on due process at America’s universities.  Politicians led by President Obama, along with prominent senators and governors, have teamed with campus extremists to falsely portray our universities as awash in a violent crime wave—asserting that one-in-five college women is sexually assaulted.  They also preposterously suggest that university leaders, professors, and students are indifferent to female sexual assault victims in their midst.  This false “rape culture” narrative has achieved widespread acceptance, thanks in part to misleading Obama Administration rhetoric and biased media coverage in outlets from theNew York Times to Rolling Stone. 

 

THE CAMPUS RAPE FRENZY decisively proves that there is no campus rape epidemic.  As part of its “War on Women” narrative following the 2010 election losses, the Obama Administration used the issue of campus sexual assault to fan moral panic with the public and foment liberal anger for political gain.  The Obama Administration exploited misleading statistics and erroneous data to advance its agenda.  In truth, Taylor and Johnson contend that the Justice Department’s own statistics suggest that no more than 1 in 40 (not 1 in 5) female college students is sexually assaulted over four years—and that 1 in 80 is raped.  Moreover, liberal activists and sympathetic journalists have recklessly misinterpreted other data, falsely asserting that more than 90% of accused male students are guilty.  Taylor and Johnson’s research makes clear that the percentage of innocent men, while impossible to know for certain, is much higher.  And many highly-publicized campus rape claims—initially treated as obviously true by the news media—have been proven fraudulent or probably fraudulent.

 

Despite these facts, federal policymakers refused to let this manufactured crisis go to waste.  The Obama Department of Education abused its regulatory authority by directing all-too-compliant university administrators to adopt new disciplinary procedures and create campus kangaroo courts that deny basic due-process rights to students accused of sexual assault.  In 2011, the Obama Administration reinterpreted Title IX—a federal law that outlaws gender discrimination at colleges—to order colleges and universities to institute revolutionary changes in their disciplinary policies, with the threat of pulling federal funds.  All changes mandated by the federal government increased the chances of guilty findings in campus sexual assault cases by weakening the rights of the accused.  The highest-profile change was the order to reduce the standard of proof to the “preponderance of evidence” typically used in civil cases instead of the stricter standards.  An accused man could thereby be railroaded out of college as a rapist and have his life and career prospects destroyed based on a 50.01% standard of proof, a mere coin toss.

 

THE CAMPUS RAPE FRENZY details how ideologically skewed campus sexual assault policies and lawless commands issued by federal bureaucrats have resulted in the creation of campus kangaroo courts that presume the guilt of the accused.  Students accused of sexual assault often have no right to legal representation or to see exculpatory evidence.  They have no right to an impartial panel or to cross-examination of their accuser.  Some schools even provide guilt-presuming “training” for disciplinary panelists to ensure that they’re inclined to find the accused guilty.  Other provisions have allowed accusers to appeal not-guilty findings, exposing accused students to a form of double jeopardy that would be unconstitutional in the criminal justice system.  Often, a single university investigator acts as prosecutor, judge, jury, and appeals court in all campus sexual assault cases.

THE CAMPUS RAPE FRENZY explores nearly four dozen case studies since 2011 in which innocent or almost certainly innocent students have been branded as sex criminals by their colleges.  Having studied tens of thousands of pages of documents never released to the public, along with information gleaned from university handbooks, statistical studies, and confidential “training” materials created for colleges and universities nationwide, Taylor and Johnson unravel the story of how America’s colleges suddenly began to treat all accusers as “survivors” while destroying the lives of the accused without any semblance of a fair process.  Taylor and Johnson contend that destroying the civil liberties of the accused will do nothing to solve the problem of campus sexual assault.  The forgotten victims of the campus rape panic are the students who, having been wrongfully accused, are then expelled from college as rapists and deprived of a future life and career.  THE CAMPUS RAPE FRENZY calls for an end to this national rush to judgment and a rededication to seeking the truth and justice based on evidence and facts—not pre-determined, politically expedient conclusions.

 

 

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Stuart Taylor, Jr. is one of our nation’s most highly respected legal journalists, a lawyer, and co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy.  He has for 35 years written about a wide range of legal and political issues for the New York Times, National Journal, American Lawyer Media, Newsweek, and many other prominent outlets.  Taylor is a frequent media guest who has appeared on hundreds of television and radio programs nationwide.  He also taught at Stanford Law School in 2011 and 2012.  Taylor received his B.A. from Princeton and graduated at the top of his class at Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of theHarvard Law Review.

KC Johnson is professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he specializes in recent U.S. political, diplomatic, and legal matters.  He is co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy and a frequent media guest.  Johnson has written five books, co-written a sixth, and edited or co-edited six additional books, and has commented widely on higher education matters, both at the Minding the Campus blog and in op-eds for such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Daily News.

 

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