While college students have been busy protesting for social justice they’ve lost their right to real justice.

Peter Berkowitz writes at Real Clear Politics.

The Demise of Due Process on Campus

Universities’ mishandling of sexual assault allegations has been making the news — but not in the way feminist activists and progressive politicians had hoped. Swarthmore College settled a case brought in federal court in Pennsylvania by an undergraduate wrongly expelled by means of a severely defective disciplinary process. A federal court in New York rejected Colgate University’s motion to dismiss on the pleadings former student Abrar Faiaz’s claim that in the rush to expel him for pushing two women, the university falsely imprisoned him, and Colgate has not challenged his federal and state discrimination claims.

Slate’s Emily Yoffe published a major story earlier this month recounting the University of Michigan’s grotesque violations of due process while investigating, prosecuting, and imposing onerous probationary restrictions on sophomore Drew Sterrett, which finally drove him from the university but which left him unable to secure acceptance elsewhere. Sterrett filed suit in federal court alleging that the school deprived him of constitutional due process rights.

Yoffe contends that universities’ implementation of procedures that presume guilt are an overcorrection to “the often callous and dismissive treatment of victims.” But the abuses of power perpetrated by university administrators and faculty that are now attracting national attention are anything but new. Kangaroo courts have been a staple of university life for decades. And the abuses of power are anything but incidental to the purpose of education as many administrators and professors conceive it. Indeed, the abuses are committed in furtherance of that purpose.

University administrators and faculty increasingly mishandle allegations of sexual assault because of a cluster of illiberal sentiments, habits of mind, and beliefs to which they subscribe and which, over the course of 30 years or so, they have embedded in university education. This is the root cause of the problem. No reform will succeed that does not address the culture of illiberalism that our campuses cultivate.