Miltenberg: “College Students Just Received Free Speech Protections, Due Process Rights Thanks To The Trump Administration,” The Daily Wire

For nearly a decade, college students have had their constitutional rights infringed simply by stepping onto campus. On Wednesday, however, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos released new Title IX guidelines that seek to restore those rights to students. The new guidelines help restore truth and fairness in college Title IX proceedings, which adjudicate claims of sexual misconduct. The Obama administration in 2011 issued guidelines that required schools to use a preponderance of evidence standard (50% plus a feather) to determine whether an accusation is truthful, and later discouraged the use of cross-examination to determine the truth. The Obama administration also fostered a climate where schools were forced to “believe all women” for fear of bad publicity should a woman claim she was a victim and the man she accused not be kicked off campus. The most famous example of this was Emma Sulkowicz, also known as “Mattress Girl,” who received national attention even though her allegations were dubious … Attorney Andrew Miltenberg, who has represented numerous high-profile students accused of sexual misconduct, including the man accused by Sulkowicz, explained what happened to students under the Obama-era rules. “Since 2011, for men accused of sexual harassment or nonconsensual sexual activity, college campuses had come to resemble a circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno. All it took was for someone to point a finger, anonymously or otherwise, and a male student would find themselves caught up in a system that was, at best Orwellian,” Miltenberg told The Daily Wire. “The specifics of the charges were illusive; access to evidence was severely limited, the investigation was borderline incompetent or meant to limit the accused from defending themselves, and the hearing was nothing short of a North Korean show trial. Findings of responsibility all too often came with little or no reasoning as hearing panels and investigators engineered the process to achieve a certain result. The sanctions that followed that result were punitive at best and could easily derail an education and be a bar to any number of career choices.”

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