As more and more schools (currently 72 since the Dear Colleague letter, and counting) have found themselves on the losing end of due process decisions, a handful of institutions have resisted in a troubling manner. Rather than acknowledge that court decisions showed the need to reform their unfair procedures, schools instead have maneuvered to neuter an accused student’s efforts to go to court.
The trend started a few months ago at Penn State. After a temporary restraining order blocked the university from suspending a student, the university abruptly announced (without informing the court) that it was withdrawing the student’s guilty finding—but would re-try him, subject to eliminating some (but not all) of the procedural defects in the investigation identified by the court. The accused student’s lawyer filed a contempt motion; the day before the hearing on the motion, Penn State withdrew plans for a new disciplinary hearing for the student.
Then came Texas, where the university president overturned a not guilty finding after the accuser—whose father was a major donor to the school—had filed an appeal. The accused student sued; the judge in the case scheduled a hearing, at which the president was scheduled to testify. Less than a week before the hearing, Texas announced that the president had cancelled his guilty finding, and would submit the accuser’s appeal to another, unnamed Texas administrator. But the court called the university’s bluff, and refused to cancel the hearing. That morning, just before the president was to take the stand, the two sides settled, and the university permanently withdrew the guilty finding.