The College Fix

School offers ‘due process’? Really?

Teresa Sullivan gave a wide-ranging interview to her local newspaper before leaving the helm of the University of Virginia tomorrow.

The transcript of her remarks to The Daily Progress make clear that the outgoing president still views the debunked Rolling Stone story about a UVA student’s alleged gang rape at the hands of a fraternity as fake but accurate.

Oddly, reporter Ruth Serven Smith didn’t even ask Sullivan about the school’s response to the Rolling Stone story – one of the defining elements of her presidency – and the news story only mentions it obliquely.

The president brought it up herself when asked for her response when “the court of public opinion asks for immediate change”:

It depends on what it is. After the Rolling Stone controversy [the debunked article, ‘A Rape on Campus’], we did look at our policies, and we made very substantial changes, which I think were for the better. People said you didn’t have to change anything because the story was wrong. Well, the story was wrong, but the underlying issue is, were there sexual assaults happening? Yes, there were, and were we responding adequately to those? I thought we could improve and I believe that we have.

In fact, as followup reporting by more responsible media outlets divulged, the official who responded to the allegations by “Jackie,” Nicole Eramo, repeatedly sought to help the student.

UVA nevertheless threw Eramo under the bus and revoked her associate dean title as she dealt with online abuse stemming from the magazine’s portrayal of her (even visually, below) as dissuading Jackie from reporting her claims. A thoroughly fake accounting of UVA’s procedures for responding to campus rape led the school to change its procedures, according to Sullivan.

As noted by Brooklyn College Prof. KC Johnson, co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy, Sullivan didn’t explain what caused the “rush to judgment” in Jackie’s case or why exactly changes were needed.

He also called it “risible” that Sullivan says another UVA response to the story was to “make sure that the person accused also got due process, as well as the person complaining.”

Johnson used scare quotes to refer to the “hearing” that UVA gives accused students, saying it gives deference to the report of a single investigator and bans cross-examination.

Sullivan's assertion that UVA responded to @rollingstone by making "sure that the person accused also got due process" is risible–UVA's "hearing" provides deference to single investigator's report, which comes process w/no x-exam.
Full cite:https://t.co/4pqZKNqlgD

— KC Johnson (@kcjohnson9) July 29, 2018

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education gave UVA a “C” grade for due process in sexual-misconduct cases in a report last year.

The taxpayer-funded university founded by Thomas Jefferson does not offer the right to counsel or right to appeal for accused students, and it does not require unanimity to expel an accused student. Its policies on “time to prepare,” conflicts of interest, access to all evidence and cross-examination are vaguely worded or give broad discretion to administrators, according to FIRE.

One of its few bright spots: UVA presumes accused students innocent.

Read the transcript of Sullivan’s interview and review its due-process rating from FIRE.

MORE: ‘Jackie’ invented both gang rape and rapist

MORE: Eramo accuses Rolling Stone of ‘actual malice’

IMAGE: pathdoc/Shutterstock

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