Quote:This is shameful. The program and the university should be better than this. The consequences to the young woman will last many years, and I don't see mention of the young man taking responsibility for his actions.
Success has its challenges, for an individual or an institution. One of those is to hold to values, even at the cost of forfeiting continued success. I worry that we are not meeting this challenge.
None of us are privy to the details of the case, and I don't know what aspect of the case is shameful to you.
The question, as always, is what threshold of certainty is needed in order to sanction someone. For a criminal trial, it would require a unanimous verdict of a jury of a 12 peers, on the basis of an evidentiary threshold of "beyond reasonable doubt". The Stanford Title IX process required 4/5 individuals on a panel of faculty, administrators, and students based on an evidentiary threshold of a "preponderance of evidence" (it now requires a unanimous finding on a panel of three). This case did not meet the threshold, and there were two people on the panel who felt the the preponderance of evidence did not show that the accused committed the assault. I don't know that any of us know how the majority came to its conclusion or how the minority came to its conclusions, nor do we know the composition of the panel.
As best I can tell, there is no allegation that Stanford deviated from its procedures due to the fact that he was a football player. There was no allegation that Stanford covered this up. The New York Times article suggests that Stanford's threshold for conviction is too high (though it is more an insinuation than an argument) and they don't talk about what they think the threshold
should be (though you might deduce from the heading that they think a simple majority is adequate).
I don't claim to know what the
right threshold ought to be. To the extent that I have seen studies on this, they have suggested that far more assaults go unreported or unpunished than false accusations are made. For criminal trials, that seems to be a tradeoff we as a society are willing to make; "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" and all that. For Title IX allegations, that threshold is very much in flux these days, and again, I don't have a right answer. Victims have a right to feel safe on campus. The accused have a right to some semblance of due process. And no matter where the threshold is set it will be impossible to get every single case right.
BC
