January 2012
Believe it or not, there is at
least one person on the Yale campus who has received less due process than
Patrick Witt, the former college quarterback and Rhodes scholarship applicant
whose reputation has been effectively destroyed by Yale and the New York
Times.
That information came last Tuesday
in ane-mail from Yale president Richard Levincelebratingthe "comprehensive,
semi-annual report of complaints of sexual misconduct and related remedial
actions" produced by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler. As already noted, the
Spangler Report explained the Orwellian procedures under which Patrick Witt
wasinvestigated or, rather, not investigated. Most of the report described the
undergraduate students who, like Witt, had been subjected to the "informal
complaint" procedure, in which limited or no investigation occurs and in which
the accuser retains all but total control of the process.
One of the Spangler cases,
however, involved a complaint by a female professor against a male colleague.
Here is the report’s description of the procedure that Yale employed: "A
faculty member sought resolution of an informal complaint alleging that a male
faculty member had sexually harassed her.
The complainant requested
confidentiality. The Chair of the UWC [University-Wide Committee on Sexual
Misconduct] met with the complainant and her department chair and they
identified measures to support and protect the complainant and monitor the
respondent."
According to Spangler, then, after
a complaint was lodged against a Yale professor, a meeting to discuss the matter
occurred between university administrators, the accusing professor, and both
professors’ department chair. But the accused professor was never informed of
the existence of the complaint, much less given a chance to defend himself. As
a result, somewhere on the Yale campus today, a department chair and members of
the administration have set up "measures" to "monitor" an unknowing member of
the Yale faculty. Big Brother comes to New Haven.
In his Wall Street Journal
article, Peter Berkowitz commented on a central irony of cases like Witt’s–that
academics, who by tradition have strongly defended due process, too often have
remained silent to the erosion of civil liberties on today’s campuses. As
Berkowitz observed, "It is outrageous but not
surprising that little protest has been heard from faculty around the country.
Some have succumbed to the poorly documented contention that campuses are home
to a plague of sexual assault. Some are spellbound by the extravagant claim
championed more than two decades ago by University of Michigan law professor
Catharine MacKinnon that America is a ‘male supremacist society’ in which women
are rarely capable of giving meaningful consent to sex."
There’s little indication that
Yale faculty members are troubled at what happened to Witt–who, after all, lacks
a profile that would be appealing to most in today’s race/class/gender-dominated
professoriate. But as the Spangler Report makes clear, the university’s unusual
conception of due process can just as easily be targeted against the professors
themselves. Indeed, President Levin has all but promised as much: "The new
procedures and services we have put in place are necessary, but they are not
sufficient."
Perhaps a recognition that they
could be the next Patrick Witt will cause some Yale professors to start worrying
about the erosion of due process rights on the New Haven campus.
Forum, February 12, 2012
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