College administrators and sexual assault cases: the story of a sort-of-changer
Here’s a curious article by Lee Burdette Williams, the former dean of students at the University of Connecticut. In it, Williams describes her growing disillusionment with the way in which sexual harassment and sexual assault cases are handled by universities and in particular university administrators such as herself. She acknowledges that accused men have not received the benefit of fairness in the proceedings, and her upset over that was one of the reasons she quit a job she’d previously loved.
I call it a curious document because although it’s essentially a political change story, and Williams seems like a nice person who has become more aware of some things, in other ways she exhibits naivete and even cluelessness. Perhaps this isn’t unusual; change is often difficult and slow.
Here’s an example of what I mean:
…[W]hen it comes to accusations of sexual assault, I have known both men and women who are brave and honest, and men and women who lie without a moment’s hesitation. So yes — “believe the woman” is a good place to start, but it is not the place to finish. And that journey from start to finish? There are many twists, detours, and roadblocks, but it must be taken. And to do so — to travel that complicated road — is not in itself a dismissal of a woman’s accusation.
Actually, “believe the woman” is a terrible place to start. It introduces bias at the very beginning of the process. “Believe the (any category of person)” is always a terrible place to start. Does Williams not understand why justice wears a blindfold? Does she not get the idea of a neutral, objective process? In some ways she appears to do so, but cannot jettison the idea that, because at times in the past women may have been routinely dismissed as liars, suddenly deciding to believe women at the outset of a proceeding and to disbelieve men is no sort of corrective at all. It merely reverses the injustice.
This is blatantly obvious.
Nevertheless, Williams appears sincere in her regret. The essay is entitled, “‘How Much Damage Have My Colleagues and I Done?’ – A former dean of students loses faith in how colleges handle sexual assault.” I doubt that most deans in Williams position have gotten as far as she has in understanding what went wrong, although in her essay she alludes to the fact that there are others who are aware of the problems.
The story of General Susan Helms should be a cautionary tale about the unfairness of these proceedings.
In 2013, Helms was nominated by President Barack Obama to become vice commander of the Air Force Space Command. Senator Claire McCaskill placed a permanent hold on the nomination because Helms had dismissed a charge of a sexual assault and punished the accused on a lesser charge leading to his dismissal from the USAF, in her role as the General Court-Martial Convening Authority, who is required to review all findings.[7][8] As Helms’s lawyer explained, Helms felt the prosecution had failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt.[9][10] Obama eventually withdrew Helms’s nomination and she retired from the Air Force in 2014.[11]
What happened was that two officer couples were on a date and one female later accused the male of assault. They had been in the back seat. The couple in the front seat had noticed nothing wrong. A zealous AG officer recommended dishonorable discharge for the defendant. She changed the decision to allow him to resign without losing his rights.
That was too much for McCaskill. So a former astronaut and LT General had her career ended.
Maybe colleges should get out, or be thrown out, of the business of holding “trials” and judging sexual assault claims. Seems to me we have a legal system created for that purpose.
What Williams heard in Phoenix has been said passionately for at least two decades. NOW she gets it?
It’s frustrating how much of a “We are the Good People” bubble these liberal/progressives live in.
because at times in the past women may have been routinely dismissed as liars,
In the imagination of Marilyn French. I think the rest of us should be very wary of the thesis that police and courts have been systematically worse at handling accusations of sexual assault than they have been at handling other sorts of accusations.
Actually, “believe the woman” is a terrible place to start. It introduces bias at the very beginning of the process.
True dat. You’re a lapsed lawyer who is at home with inductive reasoning and bullet point argument. This woman is a social worker at heart, and also someone quite vulnerable to the humbug peddled by credentialed authority. Have a gander at her CV. She put some time into composing a dissertation in the realm of ‘college student personnel administration’. It’s a scandal right there that the University of Maryland at College Park would offer a research degree in such a pseudo-subject. (She either picked up the degree during her residence in the Baltimore-Washington corridor (1989-92) or she registered in a distance learning program). Prior to that, she landed a degree in ‘school and community counseling’. No opinion about school counseling, but the course lists and descriptions I’ve seen of ‘community counseling’ as a field scream ‘pseudo-profession’. She has the indicia of a credentialed idiot, only she’s asking questions so maybe she isn’t.
Hypothesis, she’s someone on the den mother / nurse spectrum who isn’t used up and jaded after 35 years of interacting with students. And she noticed at some point she was treating some of her charges like dirt.
By the way, she’s nearly 60 years old. I’m betting that among the cohorts who came after her, her capacity to ask questions is rather less common.
Art Deco:
The courts have been worse ar sexual crimes because the situation is often “he said she said” without independent evidence. Courts are not well suited to the task because of the nature of the task. Therefore women did lose out, because they were more commonly the victims of sexual crimes than men were.
My theory is that most of these people over about 50 whether politicians or bureaucrats know most of this woke stuff is garbage but they go along with it out of fear or greed or lust for power but every now and then one of them accidentally shows a little backbone.
I just read that article today and found that it reveals the central problem of identity politics, though I doubt that the author would see it this way. A twenty-year-old man should not be punished now for what some other men got away with fifty years ago, long before he was born. He deserves to be punished only if he is actually guilty as charged. The evidence of what happened here and now is relevant, not what happened in the past to people who are not involved in this incident.
In addition, college personnel are not equipped for actual investigation and should be using the police instead.
If you were God and you could discover the actual truth of the events happening during, say 10,000, cases of collegiate sexual misadventure or aggression or forcing oneself on another, what would your statistics show?
I would guess that maybe the guy would be the guilty party in say 60% of these cases. Or more….just because we see so many examples in male animals chasing female animals all over the barnyard, etc., and the zoologists tell us that the animals with the zillions of light gametes, the sperm, are the ones that are reckless in spreading these around, compared to the animals with the fewer larger gametes who are supposed to be the ones that choose which one to let in.
But, because we have evolved and learned from the Enlightenment and the various civil-rights movements that we should presume innocence, we still have to collect the evidence, allow the confrontation of the two parties, allow witnesses, and judge by impartial juries or judges.
It doesn’t make any difference that the roll of the loaded dice is likely to show 60% that the guy was guilty.
It’s a tough problem, but we have to solve it by looking at legal systems that have taken a thousand years to evolve, and not presume that we can invent a better system of justice just for this one circumstance….all because we think we are smarter.
The courts have been worse ar sexual crimes because the situation is often “he said she said” without independent evidence. Courts are not well suited to the task because of the nature of the task. Therefore women did lose out, because they were more commonly the victims of sexual crimes than men were.
They’re more commonly the victims of sexual crimes but less commonly the victims of crime in general.
The problems are structured into the situation, not a function of anyone’s discretionary decision-making.
The thing is, law enforcement and the courts could be very rough-and-ready and quite decisive given what today would be regarded as slim evidence. People’s everyday practical epistemology relies on data that may not be much good and that contemporary technology encourages them to disregard. He said, she said might not contain sufficient information for people today, but it’s stewed through people’s understanding of human nature and of the conventions of the culture of which they are a part. (And I’m assuming the evaluators in question were acting in good faith and in good conscience, not like the Chauvin jury).
What the woman’s actually telling you is something of the assumptions about human nature and social convention in her set. And It’s pretty ugly.
Therefore women did lose out, because they were more commonly the victims of sexual crimes than men were.
Would you consider paternity fraud (including lying about being on birth control or sabotaging condoms) to be a sexual crime?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324600704578405280211043510
The link should lead to a WSJ piece by feminist activist Judith Grossman on the railroading of her son in a college sex-crime marsupial mess.
It was some years ago, referred to in various sites with more or less sympathy.
It would be interesting to know if Williams had heard of the case–why not?–and what she thought about it. To ask at this point, either way, would find various defenses erected then, later, or as a result of the question.
Johann Amadeus Metesky:
No. It would be fraud, but not in the legal sense. People voluntarily engaging in sex assume the risks of sex, which include pregnancy
“She put some time into composing a dissertation in the realm of ‘college student personnel administration’. It’s a scandal right there that the University of Maryland at College Park would offer a research degree in such a pseudo-subject. (She either picked up the degree during her residence in the Baltimore-Washington corridor (1989-92) or she registered in a distance learning program). Prior to that, she landed a degree in ‘school and community counseling’.”
[Koff…DOCTOR Jill…Koff}
Actually, “believe the woman” is a terrible place to start. It introduces bias at the very beginning of the process.
Maybe “believe the woman” simply means “start an investigation.” In other words, don’t dismiss it out of hand. No different than if someone calls the police and says “There’s a burglar in my house.” I would hope the police would at least send a car over to see what’s going on. I don’t have a problem with that. The problem is when it also implies “and presume the man is guilty.”
Maybe “believe the woman” simply means “start an investigation.”
No, the way to say that is “start an investigation.” The phrase “believe the woman” means “accept what the woman says as fact, BEFORE any investigation has taken place.” And given that what the woman is saying in these cases is an accusation of rape, it means to find the man guilty with no due process at all.
Sorry, but “believe the woman” cannot be reconciled with any objective and unbiased system of justice. My response is: “NO. Believe NO one. Follow the evidence wherever it leads.”
“Believe the woman” should be recognized for what it is: a direct attack on the rule of law and the notion of a fair justice system based on facts and evidence. It’s a call to burn all that down and replace it with lynch mobs. “Believe the woman” hands all women a fully loaded weapon with the safety off, to use against whomever they please. And that’s not an accident; it’s by design.
Nullius in verba (Latin for “on the word of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it”) is the motto of the Royal Society. John Evelyn and other fellows of the Royal Society chose the motto soon after the Society’s founding in 1660.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba
Dr. Chaotica:
That’s one of my mottoes too.
Islamic Jurisprudence is Right About Women.
🙂
“The link should lead to a WSJ piece by feminist activist Judith Grossman on the railroading of her son in a college sex-crime marsupial mess.
It was some years ago, referred to in various sites with more or less sympathy.”
Now she understands. Because it became Personal. Men Abstract and Generalise (I just did, heh). Women Personalise.
This difference has implications.
When the author is thinking of her wonderful caring former colleagues, she neglects to realize that all of those former colleagues have an interest in finding men guilty. If you’re the director of womyn studies and you want a raise or to move to a bigger school for more money, then having a portfolio of Male scalps that you helped harvest increases your market value. This is why so many of these cases pop up months after the alleged incident. The instructor or director has convinced the gal that she was assaulted. Now that administrator gets to decide the fate of the unfortunate man.
The phrase “believe the woman” means “accept what the woman says as fact, BEFORE any investigation has taken place.”
I realize of course that that is what it has come to mean. I was just trying to reconcile that writer’s use of it with the rest of her seemingly more balanced view. But maybe she was just trying to have it both ways.
No different than if someone calls the police and says “There’s a burglar in my house.”
It actually is different. The accusation is commonly not timely, the parties involved commonly have an extant association, and the accuser has quite often retrospectively re-evaluated an encounter. (Commonly after having been rebuffed by the male subsequently). Try showing up at the police station and making a complaint that your house was burgled six weeks earlier and naming as the perp a sometime friend of yours that you’ve admitted to your home time and again, a friend that has a file of amiable text messages between the two of you before and after the alleged burglary. I’ll wager the desk officers will be bureaucratic and off-hand with you.