If, that is, by “refine” you mean that they’ve gotten even more loaded against the accused, more poised to spring into action on the flimsiest pretexts, more certain to reach a guilty verdict on the basis of little or no evidence, more resolved to equate simple accusation as proof of guilt.
If you’ve followed our coverage of recent developments in the adjudication of sexual misconduct allegations on college campuses, you know that we sadly aren't joking. If only.
And the latest is also guaranteed not to make you laugh. In this follow-up at Minding the Campus to his earlier piece on the recent travesty of academic due process at Brown, KC Johnson details how the Brown approach is really catching on at other Ivy League schools as well. Note how Cornell has gotten with the program by denying the accused the right to have an attorney present to cross examine his accuser or attendant administrators. At Yale it’s even better where you can be subject to investigation if someone lodges an “informal complaint” against you. What’s an “informal complaint,” you might like to know? I can’t say for sure, but it doesn’t sound very good, since the accused can’t have counsel present, can’t question his accuser and can’t even say anything in his own defense.
In a different time and place of long ago, such procedures, as KC noted, were attributed to a sinister judicial tribunal called the Star Chamber. In the Ivy League these days, they’re referred to as “justice.”
