Ideological biases prevent us from solving our real problems.

From The Question of Race in Campus Sexual-Assault Cases by Emily Yoffe. Yoffe is tackling a fraught, complex issue which most journalists (and advocates, and universities, and government policy designers) seek to avoid.

Amy Ziering, the producer of The Hunting Ground, a 2015 campus-sexual-assault documentary, has said much the same thing. In a radio interview, she asserted that her movie exposed “privileged” well-off white men and challenged “dominant white male power.” But a close viewing of her film reveals a different reality. Her movie tells at length the stories of four allegations. In at least three of the cases, the accused is black.

How race plays into the issue of campus sexual assault is almost completely unacknowledged by the government. While the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which regulates how colleges respond to sexual assault, collects a lot of data on race, it does not require colleges and universities to document the race of the accused and accuser in sexual-assault complaints. An OCR investigator told me last year that people at the agency were aware of race as an issue in Title IX cases, but was concerned that it’s “not more of a concern. No one’s tracking it.”

Janet Halley, a professor at Harvard Law School and a self-described feminist, is one of the few people who have publicly addressed the role of race in campus sexual assault. Interracial assault allegations, she notes, are a category that bears particular scrutiny. In a 2015 Harvard Law Review article, “Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement,” she writes, “American racial history is laced with vendetta-like scandals in which black men are accused of sexually assaulting white women,” followed eventually by the revelation “that the accused men were not wrongdoers at all.” She writes that “morning-after remorse can make sex that seemed like a good idea at the time look really alarming in retrospect; and the general social disadvantage that black men continue to carry in our culture can make it easier for everyone in the adjudicative process to put the blame on them.” She has observed the phenomenon at her own university: “Case after Harvard case that has come to my attention, including several in which I have played some advocacy or adjudication role, has involved black male respondents.”

Another Ivy League law professor who has been involved in sexual-assault policy said to me of the issue of race, “Nobody wants to talk about it.” He said students are pushing their boundaries and that many hook up with a partner of a different ethnicity for the first time. But then, “if there is any kind of perceived injury—emotional or physical—when you cross racial lines, there’s likely to be more animus. It needs to be talked about and hasn’t been.” The professor requested anonymity, citing the difficulties of publicly discussing the subject.

Rape on its own is such an incandescent issue and when you mix race into that issue, you can understand why no one wants to address it.

Five or seven years ago, as I began contemplating my daughter heading off to college, I became concerned enough about the claims that 25% of all college women are sexually assaulted, that I looked at the issue very closely, investigated the methodologies and looked at the best data available. If the claims were true, I wanted to make sure to use that information to screen out universities where it would be unsafe for her to attend.

What I found was a series of claims being made for ideological/advocacy reasons which were not, and could not be, substantiated with the available data. Data was being fudged, manipulated or being collected in a way intended to support a defined end. The definition of rape was being expanded to include unsolicited hand-holding or the like. This was a classic example of what Richard Feynman called cargo cult science - trying to use the form of science in order to arrive at a desired outcome regardless of reality.

Instead of an annual claim of 6% of college women raped, the best empirical data indicated the number was more like 0.6% or substantially less. Rape, like murder, is one of the most horrendous and rightly reviled crimes in our, and in most, societies. 0.6% is only good in comparison to a claimed 6% but it is still greater than 0 which is the desired goal.

Similarly, in contrast to the claim of a patriarchal rape culture on campus, rape at colleges is lower than in society at large.

The ideologists/advocates were manufacturing and twisting data to support an ideological goal and tragically they achieved their goal. What they desired was that men, already a minority on campuses, could be accused of sexual violence and that the accusation alone was to be sufficient to determine guilt and punishment. In a move that will be studied and denounced in the future, the administration bowed to their demands and instituted just such a process on campuses. All claims were to be believed, the accused were to be assumed to be guilty, and the accused were to be stripped of their due process rights of defending themselves against the accusations.

This mockery of justice is now under review as the full magnitude of its abuse is becoming clear.

I had a second look at this issue a few years later in 2014 when Sabrina Erdely wrote her subsequently entirely discredited story, A Rape on Campus.

One of the things which caught my eye was an interview with Erdely in which she stated her goal of finding an exemplar story to highlight what she perceived as indifference on the part of university administrations about rape and their failure to protect young women.

In that interview Erdely claimed, by my recollection, that she had spent six or twelve months visiting campuses in the midwest, south and east coast to find the best story to tell. I was struck that a year's worth of work should have led her to choose a story which had so many red flags as to recall the old Soviet Union May Day parades.

I was curious that this transparently shaky story would have been the best and so I googled to try and find how many gang rapes on university campuses were in the news anytime in the past couple or three years prior to her article's publication to try and understand why none of those might be a stronger case to report than the evidentiarily challenged UVA story.

What I found, again from memory, was that there were 10 or 15 such cases working their way through the university or the criminal justice systems. Far more than I would have guessed.

But scanning the news reports on these cases, it quickly became apparent why they would not have served Erdely's purpose. Erdely wanted to go after middle class, white, preferably fraternity brothers.

Among the 10 or 15 cases, there was only one white student accused. All the rest were either African American or Hispanic and virtually all of them were members of sports teams. In virtually all the cases there was alcohol involved on the part of the accuser and the accused. In several cases there was clear evidence that the accusation was false. In others, the evidence was at best ambiguous. In only one case was there a clear cut case of gang rape and in that case all the criminals were minority. And in that case, it was being handled credibly by the traditional justice system and not by the university. A crime had been committed, the evidence gathered and assessed, a case was brought which the accused had to answer but all in a system where they were assumed innocent till proven guilty and with all their rights and due process observed.

The UVA story was the only one that met Erdely's requirements, i.e. a victim who claimed gang rape by middle class white fraternity brothers and a failure, the accuser claimed, to take her accusation seriously by the university administration. As quickly became apparent after the publication of the story, there was no rape, there was no crime committed by the fraternity brothers and the university administration had done everything in their power to be supportive of the accuser.

Yoffe is courageous for bringing this up in her equally courageous three part reporting of the shocking abandonment of civil rights for all citizens by university administrators at the behest of the former administration. These are not good people trying to do right. They are weak, mendacious, vindictive bigots seeking to punish innocent people whom they do not like.
See the Duke Lacrosse case for a similar exercise of academic cowardice to appease ideological bigots.

Full kudos to Yoffe. But she misses an opportunity to crack this open even further.

Yoffe mentions that several of the accused in her cases are athletes. I think this is the actual crux of the problem. I have no strong evidentiary base for the following hypothesis but the evidence I have seen over the past few years is consistent with it.

As far as I can tell, when you strip out regret accusations and the ambiguous cases where both parties are at least partially under the influence of alcohol, the number of cases of what most people would consider stereotypical rape are few and far between. But of those few, most involve athletes. And at most our flagship universities, athletes are disproportionately minority. I don't think this is primarily about discrimination against minorities per se, I think this is about the unfortunate tolerance by university administrations of privileged and violent student athletes on whom universities depend for revenue flows.

There may be discriminatory racial bias on the part of university administrations against accused minorities. But I don't think that is what is actually happening, or at least not the main thing that is happening.

Obviously, university administrations are at the present explicitly discriminatory against males, of any race. And the population of males credibly accused of stereotypical coerced rape are overwhelmingly athletes and at prestigious universities, the population of athletes are overwhelmingly minority.

Because no one wants to talk about real rape and race, we ignore real policies that might make things safer for women and instead indulge in immoral bigoted Potemkin policies that have the appearance of justice but which are in fact not dealing with real crimes and not fixing real dangers.

I think what we have are two root causes which are being ignored because fixing them would badly damage the interests of university administrators. The first and largest problem is widespread abusive use of alcohol on most campuses. When both parties are inebriated, there is very little that can be done about rape accusations.

University administrations don't want to take any sort of responsible position on alcohol because all of them are facing the financial squeeze of declining population cohorts, tuition rates beyond the reach of all but the richest, and a culture of catering to students as consumers of a university experience and not as students there to acquire knowledge and wisdom.

The second problem, intermingled with the first, is the increasing dependence of universities on semi-professional student athletes who generate huge revenues (both media and alumni donations) for the universities. Most real sexual assaults are being committed by student athletes in whom university administrations have a vested interest in protecting from accusations or from being found guilty.

My best read is that in terms of real rape, young women are most at risk from student athletes who are protected by the university administrations. The administration will do their best to hide or suppress accusations and protect the student athletes from any consequences of their crime.

At the same time, university administrations are eager to be seen to be serious about safety and so they strip away the due process rights of their male students, conduct kangaroo court charades in order to have a few numbers to show that they are serious about sexual assault.

The consequence of these different dynamics is that young women are most at risk of sexual assault from those who are most protected by the universities and young men are most at risk of false accusations from the university administration seeking to find anyone (other than student athletes) guilty.

This is the real tragedy and we cannot confront it until we strip away the shibboleths of academia and focus on real assaults, real due process rights and the real corruption that arises from universities running commercial athletic enterprises on which their financial well-being is dependent. Our young women won't be safe from rape and our young men won't be safe from false accusations until university administrations are held accountable, despite their financial self-interests, in identifying real crimes to be investigated by independent and responsible authorities (not the universities themselves.)