Believe it or not, there is at

least one person on the Yale campus who has received less due process than

Patrick Witt, the former college quarterback and Rhodes scholarship applicant

whose reputation has been effectively destroyed by Yale and the New York Times.

That information came last

Tuesday in an e-mail from Yale president Richard Levin celebrating the

“comprehensive, semi-annual report of complaints of sexual misconduct and

related remedial actions” produced by Deputy Provost Stephanie Spangler. As

already noted, the Spangler Report explained the Orwellian procedures under

which Patrick Witt was investigated or, rather, not investigated.

Most of the report described the undergraduate students who, like Witt,

had been subjected to the “informal complaint” procedure, in which limited or

no investigation occurs and in which the accuser retains all but total control

of the process.





One of the Spangler cases,

however, involved a complaint by a female professor against a male colleague. Here is the report’s description of the

procedure that Yale employed: “A faculty member sought resolution of an

informal complaint alleging that a male faculty member had sexually harassed

her. The complainant requested

confidentiality. The Chair of the UWC [University-Wide

Committee on Sexual Misconduct] met with the complainant and her department

chair and they identified measures to support and protect the complainant and

monitor the respondent.”

According to Spangler, then,

after a complaint was lodged against a Yale professor, a meeting to discuss the

matter occurred between university administrators, the accusing professor, and

both professors’ department chair. But

the accused professor was never informed of the existence of the complaint,

much less given a chance to defend himself.

As a result, somewhere on the Yale campus today, a department chair and

members of the administration have set up “measures” to “monitor” an unknowing

member of the Yale faculty. Big Brother

comes to New Haven.

In his Wall

Street Journal article, Peter

Berkowitz commented on a central irony of cases like Witt’s–that academics, who

by tradition have strongly defended due process, too often have remained silent

to the erosion of civil liberties on today’s campuses. As Berkowitz observed, “It is outrageous but not surprising that little protest

has been heard from faculty around the country. Some have succumbed to the poorly documented

contention that campuses are home to a plague of sexual assault. Some are spellbound by the extravagant claim

championed more than two decades ago by University of Michigan law professor

Catharine MacKinnon that America is a ‘male supremacist society’ in which women

are rarely capable of giving meaningful consent to sex.”

There’s little indication that

Yale faculty members are troubled at what happened to Witt–who, after all,

lacks a profile that would be appealing to most in today’s

race/class/gender-dominated professoriate. But as the Spangler Report makes clear, the

university’s unusual conception of due process can just as easily be targeted

against the professors themselves. Indeed,

President Levin has all but promised as much: “The new procedures and services

we have put in place are necessary, but they are not sufficient.”

Perhaps a recognition that they

could be the next Patrick Witt will cause some Yale professors to start

worrying about the erosion of due process rights on the New Haven campus.

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KC Johnson is a Professor of History at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and author of the blog Durham-in-Wonderland. He is co-author, with Stuart Taylor Jr., of “Until Proven Innocent.“