Part II of Emily Yoffe’s investigation for The Atlantic is if anything more explosive than the first: the campus assault survivor movement promotes concepts of the effect of trauma on memory (contradictory, fragmentary, belatedly-retrieved and even suggestion-induced memories ought not be discounted as forensically probative) that replicate key elements of the repressed childhood memory/dissociation scandal of a generation past (“believe the victims”). And Part III and last: What role does race play?
Debra Saunders quotes me in her new column on Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s new decision to reconsider the Dear Colleague and Blueprint policies of the Obama years: [Las Vegas Review-Journal/syndicated]:
Their decision [four Harvard law professors’] to release this memo, said Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the Libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, sends the message that if you want to defend the policy, “you’re not going to have to argue with Libertarians and conservatives” only, you are going to have to argue with left-leaning legal scholars who also care about fairness and due process….
“So much momentum has built up for federally driven changes in campus discipline and rules, so much momentum for unreasonableness,” Olson said, but the unfairness was so striking that it brought together feminists, Libertarians and Trump supporters.
Still, he added, “It took a great deal of courage for [Education Secretary Betsy DeVos] to do this. It would have been easy for her to find some way to dodge it, or postpone it.”
More accounts of discipline at particular campuses: Jesse Singal, New York magazine (USC, Matt Boermeester case, putative victim denies abuse); Nicholas Wolfinger, Quillette (University of Utah).
Filed under: colleges and universities, forensics, sexual assault, Title IX
