Hacker News Reader

Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is this is being used to try to dismantle Title IX (Devos and company are against it).

The article shows a very troubling abuse of the system, but it should be a prompt to fix it rather than destroy it.

The matter is not as simple as "Devos is against it, so we must support it"; also one could say recent revisions aren't attempts to "dismantle" it. Criticism has come from all sides:

AAUP: https://www.aaup.org/article/trouble-title-ix

Harvard Law: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/9/1/law-faculty-titl...

More law professors: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/17/professors-ur...

Again, I'm all for fixing what is broken and it appears to be broken.

This current administration engenders no trust in me, but I'm open to rare possibilities of them doing something right on rare occasion.

Why? Universities don't really want to act as a parallel judicial system, and it turns out that they're not very good at it.

We have real laws and courts. Let them work.

I see this sentiment expressed a lot, but I can think of edge cases where it fails. One case is regular sexual harrassment from a peer (say 2 students in a class). It's not technically a crime, but it's easy to see that the educational experience of the victim is worsened. In that case, I would say it's the university's responsibility to investigate and step in.

Good luck with that. We had an attempted rape on campus. The suspect was from a well-connected local family and consequently the charges were dismissed. The local fishwrapper even published a correction to the weekly police report. Thankfully we have the parallel system and don't have to deal with that student any longer.

How can you be so sure the parallel system got it right? Were you a witness? Were you presented with the evidence as a jury would be?

My wife was a witness to the crying victim. I merely caught the fellow filming women's arses on his phone during class.

Neither of these things prove rape...

I fully understand why people don't want to use the legal system. Using national data, the resolve rate here for basically anything is in the single digit. If you get robbed, assaulted, home invaded, harassed, sexual harassed, threatened, defrauded, or are victim of any of a very long list of different crimes, your time is likely better spent doing something else then report a crime. The biggest reason to file a report is to give the government data that a problem exist, rather than expecting any resolution.

Personally I have made three such reports, including two home invasions, and it is not hard to guess how many have ended up in court.

In order to fix this we could change the law and the legal system to push the resolve rate up, but there is many good reasons why society have chosen not to do that. Parallel system is much easier as long the right persons get targeted.

> as long the right persons get targeted

If we knew how to do that reliably, we could just hang people from trees.

Unfortunately, we don't.

The problem is that along with this one good outcome comes many bad ones. It's awful that we cannot make all outcomes good, but that's simply not possible.

For what it's worth, I don't think that perpetrators of violent crimes, including rape, should ever be allowed out in public. Their incarceration should be humane, but it should not be temporary. And this judgement should be made by the courts.

Society at large still has to deal with that person though.

Then the "success" is that they are now raping people off campus, rather than on it.

People like the system as it is. They could vote for a sheriff that upholds the law instead of local mores, and they could swap out the judge as well. But the majority doesn't want to. They prefer their "Trump Republicans" who "support law enforcement".

Isn't this still better than nothing?

Is it? The goal ought to be reducing the number of these crimes, not shifting their location. Or worse yet, shifting them to communities of poor and downtrodden, where they can be conveniently ignored.

We all have a scope of control we can exercise. If you are part of the university system kicking the problem out of your sphere of control is rational and effective.

This isn't the best of all possible worlds obviously.

You're not wrong. I can't fix homelessness and abject poverty, but I don't want it in my neighborhood.

(You see my point.)

From the article, it does not sound like much needs to change to prevent abuse of this level. Requirements of at least one non-anonymous source would do it.

Dismantlement seems pretty unnecessary.

But why do universities get special treatment in the first place?

Probably the mix of

1) Ubiquitous government funding

2) Student-teacher power asymmetry

3) Strength of tenure

But Title IX also applies to student-to-student claims, doesn't it?

The same could be said of a plethora of other industries that are government funded. Defense contractors, utilities, etc.

Furthermore, the last two points would make sense if Title IX only applied to teachers. But that's not the case. Even between students Title IX still applies.

I don't think DeVos wants to (or even can) repeal Title IX. I think her proposed changes are limited to the "Dear Colleague" letter sent by Obama which, among other things, mandated that colleges use a preponderance of evidence standard rather than clear and convincing or beyond a reasonable doubt.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com