Minnesota football rape case emblematic of campus witch-hunt culture
After a college football coach dared to stand up for 10 black players’ legal rights, a mob of at least 3,000 has petitioned for the University of Minnesota’s president and athletic director to fire him.
Such is today’s campus witch-hunt culture.
Coach Tracy Claeys committed the heresy of questioning whether UMinn’s Title IX adjudication denied his players due process, and supposedly enlightened liberal activists now want him charred at the stake for it.
The controversy began earlier this past fall, when several football players and one female student had a pervy sexual encounter the night after the Gophers beat Oregon State. An 82-page report by the university’s Title IX office leaves no question that these men treated the young woman with cringeworthy disrespect and acted with a profound lack of wisdom.
But there’s a legal difference between an orgy and a gang-rape.
Part of the sexual encounter was taped, and police who reviewed it described the alleged victim as “lucid, alert, somewhat playful and fully conscious,” adding that she appeared a consenting participant. The Hennepin County Attorney’s office didn’t press charges, citing insufficient evidence.
Absent proof of guilt, the football players involved remained innocent in the eyes of the law.
Not so at the University of Minnesota.
In its own report, the university’s Title IX office admitted that to discipline the 10 football players, it had only to conclude that “it is more likely than not that an alleged sexual assault or harassment occurred.” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education puts it slightly differently: The university must “be only 50.01 percent certain when determining whether a student committed an offense.”
Based on that meager standard, the University of Minnesota named, shamed and suspended 10 football players.
Yet the university’s own Title IX report, leaked this month, is far from conclusive.
It notes that the alleged victim told witnesses she thought she may have been raped, “but I am not really sure,” and that she initially viewed the sexual encounter as “an in-between situation and that she would feel bad for the men if she told the police.”
Her account also had numerous inconsistencies — which the university attributed to “a very traumatic experience, rather than to a lack of care or truthfulness.”
Administrators offered no such good faith to the football players.
Outraged by their teammates’ suspension on such dubious grounds, the Gophers held a brief walkout before Christmas.
Their demand: the university simply provide the men with a fair hearing.
Coach Claeys stood behind his team. “I want everybody to understand, the boycott was around the due process, period,” he said. The coach bemoaned how some would doubtless confuse this stance as “pro-sexual assault,” so to reinforce his sincerity, Claeys also pledged to donate $50,000 to organizations supporting rape survivors.
The University of Minnesota’s suspended athletes make for an unlikely, and perhaps unsympathetic cause to rally behind, perhaps — but it’s not just their futures at risk. FIRE has tracked more than 130 cases where students say they’ve been wrongly disciplined under Title IX, many of them in circumstances far milder than the Gophers’ degenerate night of copulation.
Moreover, men aren’t the only victims of the Obama administration’s Title IX requirements. All survivors of sexual assault deserve to have their case examined by trained investigators and prosecuted under the full force of the law. Campus adjudication puts victims’ privacy at risk and subjects their trauma to an amateur probe.
Coach Claeys’ stand against this injudicious Title IX system took courage.
The University of Minnesota would do well to show similar grit and guts.
Administrators could start by announcing the coach will keep his job.