Colleges have been cracking down on sexual assault after criticism that they do nothing to enforce their policies. But now college men accused of sexual assault (falsely, they argue) are also fighting against the harsh punishments [via The Washington Post].
The men think their colleges are making examples of them in a mad scramble to show they're being more proactive about sexual assault on campus. "The way that universities are handling the entire situation is terrible," Joshua Strange, who was expelled from Auburn after accusations of assault, told the Washington Post. "It's kind of a broken system." Even though a grand jury found insufficient evidence to indite him, an internal university investigation felt there was enough there to expel Strange.
Those campus investigations, according to the men involved, are no more than witch hunts. "I wasn't given a fair trial or anything. It's sad that this process can be abused and that the university can totally change somebody's life, with very little evidence," said a student expelled from Brandeis. "In the real world, rape and sexual assault are crimes punishable by going to jail — and rightfully so. Why is this left up to schools?"
Some of these men have found their reputations ruined by their expulsions, despite the outcomes of their legal trials. In June, former Brown University student Daniel Kopin spoke exclusively to The Daily Beast about the problems he has faced from his assault accusation, and Lewis McLeod sued for his diploma after being expelled from Duke when the office of student conduct found him guilty of sexual assault, despite being found innocent by a police investigation.
These seemingly disparate results happen because police have much more stringent standards for their investigations, and for good reason: their end results involve jail time and possibly sex offender status. As much as expulsion can affect a person's life, it's comparatively tame, so schools aren't held to the same standard. But it puts schools in a difficult position: How do they appropriately react to the extremely prevalent problem of sexual assault on campus, without risking a high incidence of false expulsions? There's a rock, there's a hard place, and there are colleges wedged firmly in the middle.
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