Imagine sending your son off to study in a prestigious school in a foreign land. It's a fantastic opportunity for him, not only to receive a quality education but to experience a completely different culture first hand. You make the necessary sacrifices, fill out the required forms, and with tears in your eyes send him off to a new adventure, secure in the knowledge that this will broaden his experience in ways you can scarcely begin to imagine.
And right you are, though the experiences found are nothing like what you hoped for or expected. In this case, a woman your son had a relationship with has accused him of assault. You find this difficult to believe, but still have faith, as you have heard the legal system in this country is devoted to protecting the rights of the accused. You wait patiently, hoping for word a thorough investigation has laid these charges to rest.
Sadly, your hope remains unrealized. Despite the accusation of a criminal act, the college has taken it upon itself to handle the matter on its own authority, thereby negating the legal protections normally involved. Before your son is even notified of the complaint, an interim suspension order is written. With little idea what is going on, your son is hauled into a disciplinary hearing. He has no right to council, no right to examine the evidence.
For that matter, it turns out in this case there is no need for evidence from the accuser at all. The college operates under the "Preponderance of Evidence" standard, meaning if the whatever review board considers it more likely or not that your son is guilty, that settles the matter right there. Tossing your son something of a bone, he is presented with an airplane ticket home and told that he can Skype through the subsequent hearings that will determine if he is to be expelled. (As it turned out later on, he was.)
Your son refuses, not wishing to miss any classes during the proceedings. For this refusal, and refusing to confess, your son is hauled into a basement area and placed in locked area for 36 hours with no means of contacting anyone in case of illness, need, or emergency. When the officials return, your son asks if he is free to go. The officials reply that he is free to back to his country of origin. On the campus, he is unwelcome.
This sounds like a terrible story, and it is. This is the kind of thing that most people swear could never happen outside of third-world hell-holes, or militant dictatorships. Oddly enough, there's a bit of truth in that. This happened at Colgate University in Hamilton, NY. Surprisingly, at least to me, this college was rated as the 22nd best liberal arts college in the United States. That rating may go up now, as the lawsuit is almost certain to make Harvard's Law Review. As it is, details for this story are documented in The New Republic.
Even more tragically, this is not an isolated incident. As with many other venues, when the feminists demanded a level playing field in higher education, what they really pulled for was realigning the tilt in their favor. In any matter involving possible gender related assaults, and colleges have all but abandoned any pretense at due process of protection for the accused where men are concerned.
Many, if not most, criminal acts never see formal charges with the police. There is no need. The college can simply declare them guilty and expel them. Needless to say, once labeled an abuser of women in their transcript, completing their education at another institution can be quite a problem.
Men, for their part, have become pretty good at reading the writing on the wall. The large shift in degrees earned favoring women isn't all about providing a more welcoming place for the ladies. Men are recognizing that the deck is stacked against them. If your entire career can be crashed at any time with an accusation that doesn't require proof and won't even give you the opportunity to put on a credible defense, why bother? They can achieve the same thing staying home and playing video games, and avoid the student debt problems. It's a win-win, right? In fact, the only loser is everyone.
With fewer college educated men, college educated women will soon find themselves with a less appealing row of suitors. Say what you like about equality, the impression I get is that a lot of women still resent dating or marrying "down" educationally speaking. Then there's the matter of fallout. I am not making the claim that all or most of the men expelled without proof are innocent, but they aren't proven guilty. That makes it very easy for them to claim innocence, with very little tangible evidence to counter. I can see a lot of resentment building up in the male campus community as more and more guys are kicked out with barely a hearing. But I'm sure that they can ignore all this, go right out and form trusting relationships without any residual bitterness.
Right...
And the worst part of all, the biggest chunk of biodegradable fertilizer in the entire mess, is that the organization pushing this mini-gender-Jihad is none other than the federal government. Through Title IX, a law originally intended (or so it was asserted) to end gender discrimination in higher education. It was through federal action that most colleges adopted the "Preponderance of Evidence" standard, leaving the accused basically without legal protection on campus. I don't know if they actually wanted to touch off a gender war on campus, but it would have been hard for them to do something to better advance that cause.
Perfect justice is an ideal, I know. You won't find it anywhere, and if you did you probably wouldn't know it. But we can do better than this. For the sakes of our sons and our daughters, we have to. We have to because, despite the propaganda on all sides, men and women need each other. They need to not just be able to coexist, but to live together in love, respect, and harmony. That isn't going to happen if we are constantly tearing into each other, if every confrontation becomes a conflagration. I know I couldn't live that way. Given a choice, I think I'd rather go back down and be locked in that basement.
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