CAMPUS FOLLIES #3, "STAR CHAMBER"
D. Citron
[ Author was Yggdrasill (an10...@anon.penet.fi) ]
[ Posted on Sat, 19 Nov 1994 16:22:55 UTC ]
YGGDRASILL
Campus Follies
(Multiculturalism and the Decline of the West)
LESSON THREE
"Star Chamber"
Robert Fogel, an econometric historian, won the Nobel Prize this
year for a book he wrote 20 years ago dealing with slavery in the
United States. We will revisit his work in a later lesson. But it
happens that Prof. Fogel wrote a perfect introduction to this
lesson in his very controversial classic of historical
revisionism, "Time on the Cross."
"Thus while the existence of slave marriages was explicitly
denied under the legal codes of the states, they were not
only recognized but actively promoted under plantation
codes. That the legal basis for slave marriage was derived
from codes which held sway within the jurisdiction of the
plantation, points to a much neglected feature of legal
structure of the antebellum South. Within fairly wide limits
the state, in effect, turned the definition of the codes of
legal behavior of slaves, and of the punishment for
infractions of those codes, over to planters. Such duality
of the legal structure was not unique to the antebellum
South. It existed in medieval Europe in the duality between
the law of the manor and of the crown; it was a
characteristic of the regimes under which the American
colonies were governed; and in lesser degree, it exists with
respect to certain large institutions today (for example,
with respect to university regulations)."
There you have it! A warning by a nobel prize winning historian
that American Universities have a separate legal system,
unrecognizable to those familiar with American civil and criminal
law.
And so it is!
The subject of this lesson is what happens when the "law of the
manor" at these Universities falls into the hands of the forces
of "multiculturalism" and the "politically correct". What might
the typical serf expect?
The first article is a survey of the treatment of our modern
serfs by campus star chambers. The second article tells us what
can happen even at a relatively "conservative" school with a
religious background when ideologues must grapple with a rather
odd accusation of "date rape".
The final pair of articles are a "moon shot" to the University of
Pennsylvania where one of its own, a security guard, is
disciplined for apprehending students stealing the entire supply
of an alternative student newspaper. The Wall Street Journal,
once again, has done a marvelous job of capturing the "rationale"
of administrators meting out justice.
Parental discretion advised for readers under the age of 18. You
may have to explain how the act of stealing alternative student
newspapers to suppress their editorial content becomes subject to
a special set of "Open Expression Guidelines" requiring that
campus security recognize such acts as "protest" and call in
special "Open Expression Monitors."
YGGDRASILL recommends that you read the following:
Sep 27, 1993 Wall Street Journal p. A22
A Mockery of Justice on Campus
By SCOTT GOTTLlEB
With the dawn of a new academic year, college students and
their parents should take note of a disturbing trend afflicting
America's institutions of higher learning: The rise of powerful
student judicial boards.
The boards, often jointly run by students and a smattering of
willing faculty members, are charged with meting out everything
from whiny disputes between students and infractions of speech
codes to allegations of criminal battery and date rape. They are
given considerable license to determine guilt or innocence and
have no obligation to recognize U.S. civil procedures or legal
traditions. But most troubling is that student judiciary boards
are rapidly turning into new front groups as campus radicals
fight the backlash against political correctness.
At my school, Wesleyan University, a panel of seven
students-the Student Judiciary Board--promises to hear all
charges brought before it. The board deliberates in secret,
provides no explanation of why it reached a particular decision
and doles out punishments ranging from letters of reprimand to
expulsion. As at most schools, few students at Wesleyan, myself
included, have faith in the student-run board. I'm not sure if
anyone ever did.
Students are terrified to appear before the board, paying close
attention to their own actions lest one false move land them
before the SJB.
Trumped-Up Charges
Last year, while editor of the Wesleyan student newspaper, I
was brought before the judicial board on trumped-up charges
stemming from an investigation my newspaper made of a cult
operating on the Wesleyan campus. The charges, coming just
several months after my newspaper exposed the cult in a series of
front-page articles, were not supported by the SJB. But my
exoneration came only after a protracted investigation and a
lengthy hearing.
The current crisis in confidence at Wesleyan can also be traced
back to last year, when a professor charged that a Wesleyan
student stole her wallet. The evidence? She claimed to have seen
this student sneaking around the women's locker room. The local
police investigated briefly, but lacking evidence they decided to
drop the investigation. The SJB, however, decided to hold a
hearing on the matter.
The evidence in the mock trial was scant: the testimony from
the walletless professor. The rest was circumstantial as well:
The student was seen returning athletic gear near the locker room
around the time of the theft. But despite the flimsy evidence,
the accused was found guilty and, just weeks away from
graduation, was suspended for one academic year. The sentence was
eventually overturned, but only after the professor recanted her
testimony and the school president intervened.
There have also been a number of cases where students were
given punishments that in no way approximated the seriousness of
their offenses. At Williams College this spring, a male student
left a message on the telephone answering machine of a fellow
male student with whom he had a dispute. In the message, the
student tried to provoke his adversary by pretending he was a
well-known gay student and saying he wanted to go on a date with
the student who owned the answering machine and engage in
homosexual activity. When confronted about the message, the
student admitted his role in the matter and apologized. But
according to Williams's judicial codes, the caller had violated a
rule barring "offensive" speech and was suspended for an entire
academic year.
An appeal of the ruling was denied.
There was a similar injustice perpetrated at Brown University
this spring, where a male sophomore was accused of stealing food
from a campus eatery by a female student. After returning to his
room in a drunken state that night, the student left three vulgar
messages on the woman's answering machine. (He later had no
recollection of the content of the messages, owing to his
inebriation.)
The Brown judiciary committee (comprising equal numbers of
students, faculty and administrators) found the student guilty of
"behavior which shows flagrant disrespect for the well-being of
others." The punishment for this minor, admittedly juvenile,
transgression netted the student a whopping 4 year suspension.
The implication was that the student's drunken barbs were so
offensive that the female student could not study in such an
environment and the presence of the caller was thus a barrier to
learning. The student will not be eligible to reapply to Brown
until 1997, when the woman he telephoned is scheduled to
graduate.
These incidents and many others make it clear that student
judicial boards have become increasingly politicized to punish
those who dare to stray from the prevailing ideological hegemony.
Schools create powerful judicial boards by codifying lists of
very harsh and specific penalties for violations of their
internal codes and combine them with offenses kept as generic as
possible. The vagueness of the offenses and the possibility of
ominous, complicated proceedings before the mock courts have
created the desired air of uncertainty and intimidation, in
writings by students, in oral presentations in class, in physical
relationships, and even in private dealings with another student
who might report to the speech police.
Tragically, student judiciary boards do not confine their
jurisdiction to petty transgressions of speech codes.
Procedurally unsound to begin with, these boards often overreach
by adjudicating in criminal cases, notably accusations of date
rape. These cases are usually hushed up on campus by nervous
college administrators and embarrassed students.
In one publicized case this spring at Yale that makes a mockery
of standard American notions of justice, the College Executive
Committee expelled a male undergraduate for the alleged rape of a
female student, though he denied the charge and there was no
medical evidence supporting the accusation. Lacking the proper
qualifications to handle criminal accusations, the Yale committee
disregarded standard Western legal procedures and traditions.
As at most schools, the accused was denied full representation by
outside legal counsel during his hearing and was prevented from
questioning his accuser, or even hearing her testimony. He was
also required to give testimony that could be later used against
him in a real court of law (in most cases students are not read
their Miranda rights). This is not uncommon. Wesleyan tapes the
testimony given in all of its hearings and saves the recordings.
Not surprisingly, in one case a few years ago, tapes from the
hearings were subpoenaed as evidence in a real criminal trial.
In many cases, the results of allowing facile accusations to be
adjudicated by mock tribunals is that innocent people are certain
to be targets of censorship and character assassination at the
hands of a zealous squadron of thought and speech police. In
other cases, when the student members of these boards make
politically unpopular decisions, such as exonerating accused
rapists, campus activists are often outraged. Protests erupted
four times' in the past two years at Wesleyan when male students
accused of rape were found' not guilty by Wesleyan's SJB. It is
significant to note, however, that in all four of these cases not
one of the accusers took her charges to the local police
department.
Shirking Responsibility
A large part of the problem is that there is an abdication on
the part of college deans and presidents of their responsibility
to engage issues of principle. In dealing with demands from
minority activists and feminists that students who trespass
against the prevailing orthodoxy be dealt with harshly, college
officials duck responsibility by subordinating matters of,
principle to expediency, allowing "justice" to be meted out by
mock courts.
One can only hope that America's colleges and universities will
be brought to answer for their arbitrary rules and regulations
and their means of enforcing those hazy standards. To those ends,
the Collegiate Speech Protection Act, sponsored by Rep. Henry
Hyde (R, M.), may be a good first step. It would allow students
at private schools that receive federal funds to seek through the
courts the same constitutional protection students at public
schools, can now receive.
In the meantime, there are other things that can be done. Both
the Williams and Yale students, for example, have filed lawsuits
against their respective schools. If the fracas continues, one
can be certain other aggrieved students will follow their
example. How college officials square all this absurdity with
their claim to teach students about truth, freedom and justice
should be an interesting revelation.
Mr. Gottlieb is a senior at Wesleyan University in Middletown.
Conn., and editor of the Wesleyan Review.
Apr. 12, 1994 Wall Street Journal p. A1
Campus Dilemma
The Risk of Lawsuits Disheartens Colleges Fighting Date Rape
Measures to Assist Victims Lead to Bitter Wrangles Over Rights of
Others
Amateurs on Hearing Panels
BY EDWARD FELSENTHAL
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
VALPARAISO, Ind. - Set in a quiet town whose biggest activity
is an annual popcorn festival honoring native son Orville
Redenbacher, Valparaiso University is almost quaintly old-
fashioned. It still imposes curfews on freshmen. Male and female
students can't visit each other's rooms after hours. Despite
vigorous campus protest two years ago, the health center won't
distribute condoms.
"As a Christian institution," explains student Anne Shepler,
"this place has always tried to avoid dealing at all with
sexuality."
But school officials haven't been able to avoid contending with
the national outcry about date rape, and with the perception that
it is rampant. Two years ago, officials at the Lutheran-
affiliated university began working on a policy to combat sexual
assault.
Last spring, at a "Take Back the Night" antirape demonstration,
about 100 students wore armbands to signify that at some time in
their lives they had been assaulted. After the rally, several
women stood before a microphone at the campus coffeehouse and
told of being raped at Valparaiso.
Redress for Victims
The school's president, Alan Harre, quickly convened a meeting
with a group of administrators at which he asked some of the
women to discuss their experiences. The gathering lasted until
about 3 a.m. and left some of the administrators close to tears,
says Kirsten Lee, a student who helped organize the event. Among
the students' aims: to help victims get some redress without
having to endure the emotional trauma of a criminal trial.
Thus, Valparaiso joined the growing number of campuses thrown
into turmoil over how to adapt a disciplinary system to charges
that, if brought in criminal court, would be felonies. As other
schools also are learning, when it comes to sexual politics, it
is much simpler to create new rules than to enforce them-or
predict their repercussions.
Mr. Harre says he was "touched by the poignancy of the issues";
by the start of the current school year, Valparaiso had a sexual-
assault policy in place. In addition to providing for
disciplinary procedures, the school posted in every dormitory
room a list of suggestions on how students could avoid being
accused of assault or avoid being assaulted themselves.
Valparaiso also set up a special counseling office for victims,
housed in the same building as the home-economics department.
Leading To Lawsuits
The measures were well-received on campus. "You can say that by
handing out condoms, you're encouraging promiscuity," says senior
Daniel Sasse, who serves on a campus committee on sexual assault.
"The fact that [people] want to help someone who has been raped,
you can't really argue with that."
But in the age of litigation, helping one group often leads to
lawsuits by another. At Yale University, a star basketball player
who was kicked out last year for an alleged rape has sued the
school over its disciplinary procedures. Similar lawsuits have
confronted Old Dominion University in Virginia and the University
of New Hampshire.
It was to be much the same at Valparaiso. When the new sexual-
assault policy was invoked last fall, the aftermath severely
tested the university's resolve to deal with date rape.
Shortly after the semester began, a woman accused a man she had
known since high school of raping her. In late August, she told
campus authorities, she asked the man to dinner at the student
union because he had been making advances toward her and she
wanted to explain that she wasn't interested in a romantic
relationship. Later that week, assuming she had made the message
clear during the dinner, she accepted the man's invitation to a
fraternity drinking party where, she said, the man led her into a
small room, locked the door and raped her.
Conflicting Versions
The man told a very different story. He said that the woman had
been flirting with him and that she had participated voluntarily
in a fraternity-party drinking game. Around 3 a.m., he said, the
two of them had sexual intercourse. He maintained that the sex
was consensual and that she accused him of rape after having
"second thoughts and guilt" about betraying her boyfriend,
according to the man's lawyer, John Bushemi.
Through Mr. Bushemi, the man declined to be interviewed.
Because of the nature of the allegations and the fact that no one
has been criminally charged, this newspaper is withholding both
of the students' names.
If a student chooses to press charges, a campus date-rape case
may wind up in criminal court, where sorting through conflicting
stories with little independent evidence is daunting even for
professional law enforcers. In campus proceedings, school
officials find the task still more complicated as they try to
follow university policy exactly and avoid making any missteps
that could hold legal implications.
Students have sued colleges in civil court seeking new campus
hearings, reinstatement in school and even monetary damages. Some
have won on grounds ranging from violation of due-process rights
during a campus hearing to breach of the school's contract with
the student by deviating from policies outlined in the student
handbook.
"The kind of amateurism that is inevitable in the proceedings
makes you very vulnerable," observes Thomas H. Wright Jr., vice
president of Princeton University.
The Disciplinary Process
The Valparaiso disciplinary panel convened to hear the case in
a small classroom in Christ College, home of the university's
academic-honors program, according to Students who were
participants. The panel, composed of four administrators,
listened to testimony from several students and eventually ruled
that the man had violated Valparaiso's sexual-assault guidelines
and would be suspended.
Defending the disciplinary process, which is similar to that of
other colleges, Valparaiso spokeswoman Pat Downing emphasizes
that "these procedures have nothing to do with whether a student
is guilty or not guilty at civil or criminal levels."
But two weeks later, in federal district court in Hammond,
Ind., the male student sued the school and the panel members,
calling the hearing a sham and seeking $12 million in
compensatory and punitive damages. The man charges that, in the
school's zeal to assuage campus concerns about date rape, it
violated his rights by refusing to allow testimony from several
students he wanted to speak on his behalf. The school also
unreasonably refused to delay the hearing for a week so that the
man could prepare his case, he contends.
In court papers disputing the charges, Valparaiso responds that
the man missed the deadline for changing his lineup of witnesses
and that students who were on his list before the deadline got to
testify.
The woman who made the rape accusation hasn't sued anybody, but
she is bitter about the disciplinary process. She says "the
backlash was so bad" that she considered leaving Valparaiso.
* * *
July, 26, 1993 Wall Street Journal p. A10
Penn: The Report
Not long ago, during the memorable Water Buffalo trials at the
University of Pennsylvania, we also reported on the concurrent
suspension of Donald Fitzgerald, director of security for Penn's
University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Mr.
Fitzgerald, it appeared, had run afoul of the Penn administration --
which has some markedly peculiar notions about the dutes of
security officers -- because he tried to apprehend two women
students running out of the museum carrying three large plastic
bags.
It turned out that the women were not, as Mr. Fitzgerald
worried, running off with museum pieces. Part of a group of black
activist students aggrieved by the views aired in the student
paper, the women had confiscated all the copies of "The Daily
Pennsylvanian" at the museum, as their friends were doing
elsewhere around campus. On April 15, virtually the entire press
run of the paper was appropriated and carted off.
The administration, headed at the time by President Sheldon
Hackney (who recently won confirmation as head of the National
Endowment for the Humanities), determined at once that Mr.
Fitzgerald should be suspended from his security duties. He would
remain on suspension many weeks, while a "blue ribbon panel"
appointed by the Penn administration deliberated over the events
of April 15.
Those deliberations have at last come to an end. With that end
has also come a report on the panel's findings -- one so
remarkable for the depths of its fastidiously argued nonsense
that we thought it only fitting to reprint portions nearby (see
related editorial: "Doublethink at the University of
Pennsylvania" -- WSJ July 26, 1993). The document is a pure
specimen of political cravenness. But such cravenness is hardly
limited to the University of Pennsylvania.
The unhappy fact of university life today is that there are
many Penns and many administrators who thought they were
purchasing peace by accommodating political zealots.
The degree of that effort to accommodate is reflected in the
central pronouncement of the Penn panel's report -- namely the
judgment that the theft of the newspapers was a "form of protest"
and therefore not criminal behavior. Apparently, then, any
assault -- including, presumably, the removal and destruction of
library books some group considers offensive -- might be held
immune from prosecution if it's a "protest."
The report goes on to say that rather than taking action, the
police should have contacted entities at Penn called "Open
Expression Monitors" to study the students actions. Think we're
making that up? Read the nearby excerpt. The panel concludes that
the Museum security director's pursuit of the women with the
shopping bags was "inappropriate" once those students had left
the property of the Museum and was not in "accordance with . . .
his job functions." Presumably, then, any thief who wishes to
appropriate some invaluable museum piece can now consider himself
immune from pursuit, if he can get past the door and grounds.
The report recommends that for his inappropriate behavior,
security director Fitzgerald's superiors should review his role
for possible disciplinary action. Mr. Fitzgerald -- who has been
returned to active duty -- received a letter of reprimand and
will, along with other security personnel, have to attend
sensitivity training classes.
There have been other instances in which activists have
undertaken to silence opposition views by removing the offending
publications. At Penn State (not the same as the U. of
Pennsylvania) two former students -- journalism majors, no less --
made off with four thousand copies of an alternative,
conservative student publication called the Lionhearted. Here the
legal outcome was different. To their credit, the police charged
the perpetrators with theft, receipt of stolen property, and
criminal conspiracy.
Still, it's a measure of how far the assault on free
expression has gone on campuses that the Penn State undergraduate
paper, the Daily Collegian, actually editorialized in favor of
the notion that the removal and burning of the Lionhearted was a
legitimate act of free expression. Presumably these student
"journalists" will soon be making their way into the American
press corps.
George Orwell had the word for this sort of reasoning -- and
for the entire tenor of the Penn panel's report. That word is
"doublethink" -- a description unfortunately as relevant today as
it was in the 1930s.
During his confirmation hearings, Mr. Hackney assured the
Senators that his administration took the most serious possible
view of the theft of the Daily Pennsylvanian papers, and that the
students who took them would be disciplined. Just how seriously
the university in fact took this attack on the right of free
expression will be clear to anyone who wants to take a look at
the excerpts of this stunning Orwellian document from the minds
running America's campuses.
July, 26, 1993 Wall Street Journal p A10
Doublethink at the University of Pennsylvania
Following are excerpts from the report of a panel of
University of Pennsylvania administrators appointed to study the
theft of one entire press run of the student newspaper. The
papers were seized all over campus by black activist students
opposed to The Daily Pennsylvanian's editorial content.
The report, which criticizes security guards, absolves the
students of any wrongdoing -- except failure to show I.D. cards.
The panel analyzed what supposedly transpired at each of the
campus sites involved.
A related editorial appears today {see related editorial:
"Review & Outlook (Editorial): Penn: The Report" -- WSJ July 26,
1993}.
Individual Incidents on April 15, 1993
1. Biomedical Library/Johnson Pavilion (6:52 a.m.): Incident
involving two students and two officers responding to a call from
a School of Medicine security guard.
The panel found that one officer behaved in a discourteous
manner toward the students by ordering them to leave before
determining who they were or giving them an opportunity to
explain their presence.
The panel found that his actions violated Section 8.4.02 of
the "UPPD University of Pennsylvania Police Department Policies
and Procedures Manual" and should be reviewed by his supervisor
for possible disciplinary action.
The panel found that the Medical School security guard behaved
appropriately by contacting the UPPD.
The panel recommended that all security personnel receive
training on working and interacting with people from diverse
backgrounds. This training should include information about the
diversity of the Penn community and the expectation that all
members of the community should be treated with civility and
respect regardless of race, color, sex, sexual orientation,
religion, national or ethic {sic} origin, age, disability, or
status as a disabled or Vietnam era veteran.
2. Blockley Hall/Johnson Pavilion (7:48 a.m.): Incident
involving two students, one Medical School security officer, one
Medical School Supervisor of Security, one security officer . . .
and four police officers responding to a call to UPPD that "A
black male at Blockley Hall tried to take all the DP's {Daily
Pennsylvanians}."
The panel found that one officer behaved in an unprofessional
manner in violation of Section 8.4.02 of the "UPPD Policies and
Procedures Manual" by cursing at the student and used excessive
force . . . by striking the student with his baton. The panel
also found that the officer failed to conduct a proper and
thorough investigation because he neglected to interview the
security personnel who were in pursuit.
3. David Rittenhouse Laboratories (8:20 a.m.): Incident
involving two students, four officers, and the UPPD dispatcher.
When two officers stopped the students carrying a large trash bag
outside of DRL, they were informed by the students that this was
a protest action.
The panel found that the responding officer . . . violated
Section 5.22.0 of the "UPPD Policies and Procedures Manual" by
not requesting that a supervisor be dispatched to the scene in
response to a demonstration.
The panel found that the dispatcher violated UPPD Divisional
Directive 92.08 by making a command decision without consulting a
supervisor.
4. University Museum/Sports Medicine (8:16 a.m.): Incident
involving two students, a Museum security guard, a Museum
administrator and two officers. The Museum administrator pursued
the students, who took the DP's from Kress Gallery, and caught up
with them in Weightman Hall, where he made a "citizen's arrest"
and detained the students.
The panel found that the Museum administrator's actions in
pursuit of the students were inappropriate after they left the
property of the University Museum and not in accordance with the
authority and responsibility of his job functions. His actions
should be reviewed by his supervisor for possible disciplinary
action.
The panel found that the students should have shown their Penn
cards.
---
In summary, the panel concluded that once the incident
occurred at DRL David Rittenhouse Laboratories, the UPPD should
have recognized that the removal of the DP's from at least three
different locations was a form of student protest and not an
indicator of criminal behavior. According to the University's
"Emergency Procedures Protocols" . . . the UPPD should have
contacted the Office of the Vice Provost for University Life as
soon as it recognized that the students were involved in a form
of protest. Once the VPUL was notified of the protest, Open
Expression Monitors would have been dispatched to observe and
monitor the students' actions, in compliance with the existing
Open Expression Guidelines. Since this act was a form of protest
and not a criminal offense, it would have been more appropriate
for Open Expression Monitors, not police officers, to mediate and
attempt to resolve any further conflicts that resulted from the
removal of the DP's. The Open Expression Monitors could have
informed the students about the Open Expression Guidelines,
notified them if their actions violated the Guidelines, and
identified students who violated the Guidelines.
Recommendations
It is vital that all UPPD personnel receive additional
training about appropriate responses . . . to student
demonstrations and protests. This training must include extensive
information on the University's Open Expression Guidelines and
the role and responsibility of Open Expression Monitors.
The UPPD Policy on handcuffs, Section 5.7.06, should be
reviewed . . . to ascertain if there are circumstances when it
may be inappropriate to handcuff detainees. . . . The application
of any newly implemented policy should be monitored . . . to
ensure that the policy is applied consistently, is
non-discriminatory, and has no adverse impact on any group of
people. After the policy is implemented, data should be
maintained by the Department on the race and sex of individuals
handcuffed, nature of offenses, and reasons for handcuffing.
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