Saving FACE: Alerting Students and Parents To The Risk

Last Saturday, I was the keynote speaker at a conference of FACE, Families Advocating for Campus Equality. It was a sobering experience in a great many ways, meeting many parents and students who have been through the wringer of being wrongfully found responsible for sexual misconduct of some form or another and having to deal with the consequences. While the deal is that nobody talks about fight club,

One of the themes that emerges was how to inform new students and their parents of the Kafkaesque nightmare of campus sex inquisitions. Concern for this issue has been greatly exacerbated by the impending shift in rules under Catherine Lhamon, Biden’s head of the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights, who is determined to undo the minimal due process provided under the De Vos rules, perhaps the only thing the Trump administration got right. Having spent a decade fighting to give the accused a chance to defend themselves, the whiplash felt by Lhamon’s malicious undoing of the reform is painful.

The problem, far too well known by the families who are involved with FACE, is that a student gets a benign email asking him to come by for a chat with the Title IX administrator, maybe with some vague notification of a problem or maybe not, only to be sandbagged with a three-year-old accusation of a rape.

Often, the student has no appreciation that he’s about to walk into the lion’s den. He won’t tell his parents, either because he doesn’t think it’s needed since he did nothing wrong, or he’s embarrassed or doesn’t want to burden them, and so he goes to the meeting solo, only to be subject to interrogation designed to coerce him into admitting his offense.

Even after the very unpleasant meeting, the student lacks a real appreciation of what just happened and still fails to call his parents, believing that his quasi-denials of wrongdoing (remember, students are indoctrinated in mandatory training to apologize, not because they did wrong but because their accuser feels they did wrong, and that’s sufficient to command an apology and confession of guilt) will suffice to put the matter to rest. Occasionally, it is. Most of the time, it’s not.

One point beaten to death by lawyers doing Title IX work is that the best opportunity to address false accusations is to be represented from the outset, before the initial interrogation, and certainly before the hearing where the student will be found responsible. The problem is that students can’t afford to hire counsel, and their parents (who may also be unable to retain a lawyer, but that’s another problem) need to bring their parents into the mix and then the parents need to know where to turn to find a lawyer with knowledge and experience in his highly niche practice. Title IX defense is very much a specialty, and no matter how good or trusted a lawyer may be otherwise, a successful defense requires a lawyer who appreciates just how prolix and absurd the process can be.

Thus, the question bandied about was how to accomplish this, how to let students know that they should, they must, alert their families immediately upon getting that unremarkable email from the Title IX investigator. How to let families know where to turn when they get that call from their kid, rather than call their real estate lawyer or their second cousin who just graduated law school. How to save a young person who did nothing wrong.

At one point, FACE tried to put up fliers in schools to let students know what to do and where to turn, but they didn’t make it to the end of the day before being torn down. Whether by admins or activists for whom throwing a few innocent young men under the bus is unfortunate collateral damage in the glorious war for infantalized women. But I digress.

Universities won’t let them into their freshman indoctrinations about how men are responsible no matter what. Parents of students entering college don’t believe that their little darlin’ will ever be accused of rape, because he’s a good boy, so no reason to be concerned for, or even interested in, an organization dedicated to fighting for due process for the accused on campus.

FACE has the website, has the support, has the resources to guide a parent when they finally get the phone call, but will the parent find FACE? When they do, will it be too late to seize the best oppotunity to help their child who, after realizing that the problem won’t go away because it’s crazy and never happened, will finally be constrained to call home to let mom and dad know that they’ve been suspended or expelled?

That phone call, when your son is on the phone, sobbing, because he’s just come to the realization that everything he’s worked for up to that point, every sacrifice he made and his parents made to get him to that place where he might be able to achieve his goals for a good life, has suddenly disappeared in a wild flash of utterly baseless and nonsensical accusations.

How are students and their parents to learn of the minefield they’re entering before it’s too late? And if this was bad before, it’s about to get worse again as the opportunity to challenge accusations is deliberately denied these students by a cohort of Title IX saviors of survivors determined to make absolutely certain that no “rapist” goes unpunished. And if it means that ten innocent people are held responsible to that one guilty person does not walk free, Lhamon as well as most college administrators will shrug. They can live with that, as it’s far better than women on campus thinking their school won’t do anything necessary to support “survivors.”