Ed Morrissey of Hot Air has written a column for The Fiscal Times which outlines the completely unacceptable way in which due process is ignored on college campuses.

Guilt by Accusation—How Colleges Deal with Campus Sex

Imagine living in a place where those accused of committing violent crimes are considered by the system to be guilty until the accused can prove their innocence. In such a place, the system may not even wait for an alleged victim to complain of a crime being committed, but bring charges on their own based on sheer speculation. The accused gets no access to the evidence or the witnesses, and receives no answers when asking questions about them. The same system that convicts the alleged perpetrator hears the only appeal available.

Sounds like a terrible place to live, right? Reminiscent of the old Soviet Union, maybe, or a banana republic? Unfortunately, that far-off land may be in our own back yards, at the local college or university. It may take an avalanche of lawsuits to restore due process at the very institutions on which we rely for finishing the education of our best and brightest.

Take the example of a male student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who filed suit against the school after having found him guilty of sexual misconduct. During a dorm room party, he met a young woman attending Amherst, flirted for a while, danced and socialized, and then had consensual sex, according to the lawsuit. The female student could not recall what happened the next morning, and went for an evaluation at the campus health center. The next day she filed a written complaint, which never included any accusations of rape, assault, or harassment.

Yet Amherst immediately opened an investigation of those specific allegations and ordered him to move off campus. Two months later, the school held a hearing without providing the accused with access to the complete set of documentation, and evidence was ignored – as were a number of the questions asked by the accused. After three days, Amherst informed him that he was determined to be “responsible” for “sexual harassment, sexual misconduct, and [violating] community living standards.” The school expelled him after he appealed to the same administration responsible for the original hearing.