Expulsion Now Mandatory for Dartmouth Students Convicted By Campus Rape Tribunal Under Low Evidence Standard

Dartmouth College is now
expelling all students found guilty of sexual assault through the
campus judiciary process. Inside Higher Ed notes that
automatic expulsion is precisely what many activists want, although
some colleges have settled on a dubious compromise: make
convictions clear and easy but punishments light.

It’s a compromise that pleases no one—and shouldn’t.
Universities are essentially letting the convicted off lightly as
compensation for the fact that the campus judicial process—which
often does not following normal rules of evidence or due process—is
fundamentally unjust. As Inside Higher Ed
notes:

The compromise may be doing little to appease either side, with
lawsuits still being filed by the accused and protests being staged
by survivors and other students. Dartmouth’s decision received
praise from some student groups and safety advocates, but other
colleges and universities may be slow to adopt similar policies,
even as many advocates for sexual violence survivors are pushing
for expulsion to be the default punishment.

… In recent months, a handful of institutions,
including Amherst
College, Duke University and Vassar
College, have put more emphasis on expulsion as a penalty, but
stop short of making it mandatory. Duke’s is perhaps the closest to
Dartmouth’s, with a policy that refers to expulsion in cases
of sexual
misconduct as the “preferred sanction.” For the most part,
however, colleges and universities still decide upon expulsion on a
case-by-case basis, as they would for many other types of
misconduct on campus.

… Last year, the University of Michigan expelled a former
football player for an alleged sexual assault in 2009, and earlier
this year — for the first time in at least a decade — the
University of Iowa also expelled a student accused of sexual
assault.

No criminal charges have been brought against any of the
men, and neither of the universities has a default
expulsion policy for cases of sexual assault. Instead, they follow
the Campus SaVE Act’s broader requirement for addressing assaults,
which only mandates that university policies include “possible
sanctions or protective measures” that institutions can impose in
cases of rape, sexual assault, and other kinds of domestic and
dating violence. [Emphasis added.]

Is it wrong to expect that when a student becomes the
victim of a sexual crime, that person should notify the police and
seek justice under typical criminal procedures? Does student status
confer some special right to have criminal complaints adjudicated
under a much lower standard of evidence, with fewer rights retained
by the accused?

Automatically expelling all students found guilty of rape
is a perfectly defensible policy, but only if guilt is adjudicated
in an actual criminal trial.