New APPS

There is a lot of controversy and protest among the students at Stanford University concerning what many are calling the mild punishment of a male undergraduate, found by a university committee to have been guilty of sexual misconduct and sexual assault using force.   The student will receive a five-quarter suspension, which will begin after he graduates, and he will be allowed to enroll at Stanford as a graduate student (he had already been admitted) after taking a “gap year.”

In this article about the events at Stanford, the Huffington Post details some disturbing statistics about the punishments doled out to sexual assailants at some of Stanford’s “peer institutions”.   It appears to be Stanford’s policy, for example, to allow such assailants to return to campus once their victims have graduated.   Since the victim in this case is graduating this year, the suspension is very short.  (And, inter alia, since 20% of U.S. college women have suffered some form of sexual assault by a male student, but around 5% of male college students sexually assault women, allowing students to return to campus to repeat offend seems like a terrible idea.)

One fact that I noticed about the Stanford case what that news reports kept mentioning an “Alternative Review Process”.   It turns out that Stanford recently created a new process for reviewing allegations of misconduct by students when it turns out that the allegation involves sexual harassment, sexual assault, and the like.   The alternate review process requires preponderance of evidence instead of a stronger evidentiary standard.     This leads me to wonder if universities are engaging in a dangerous compromise here.  On the one hand, out of concern for the worry that allegations of sexual assault and the like are often very difficult for the victim to substantiate, universities are moving to make it easier for victims to make their cases.   A commendable effort, to be sure.  At the same time, however, is this move raising the fear of legal retaliation from the alleged assailants among administrators?  And are they responding to this fear by making sure that the assailants punishments are sufficiently mild to disincentivise this?  If so, this strikes me as a dangerous compromise.   Any thoughts from readers if my suspicions are justified?

(Its true, of course, that the practice of giving slaps on the wrist for sexual misconduct predate the alternative review processes.   But I wonder if Title IX pressure has led universities to go after the issue of making it easier to substantiate claims and leaving the extemely mild punishments in place to protect themselves against possible back reactions.) 

Update:  thanks to Jon and Catarina for providing a link to support the claim about a small number of male students committing the large number of rapes of female students.