Title IX Almost Ruined My Son’s Life

Article here. Excerpt:

'In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal today titled “A Mother, a Feminist, Aghast,” attorney Judith Grossman writes about her family's harrowing ordeal after her college-age son was accused of “nonconsensual sex” by an ex-girlfriend, several years after their relationship ended.

Grossman’s piece reads like a Kafka-esque nightmare: with no preliminary inquiry by the school into the accusations, Grossman says, the college's Title IX office operated under the assumption that “my son would not be afforded a presumption of innocence.” A campus tribunal—seemingly, with no particular background in the law or in evaluating legal evidence—would rule on the claim, with only half of the tribunal needing to decide that the alleged incident “more likely than not” occurred for punishment to be meted out. ...

Grossman, being a lawyer, was able to fight for her son’s constitutional rights (“Who knew that American college students are required to surrender the Bill of Rights at the campus gates?”), and the charges against him were ultimately dismissed. But she concludes that, in Title IX’s well-meaning zeal to guarantee equality between the sexes on university campuses, it has “obliterated the presumption of innocence that is so foundational to our traditions of justice.” Fighting for women’s rights is all well and good—Grossman is a self-identified feminist, after all—but this incident smacks of wreaking “the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct.”'