HANS BADER writes about the Office of Civil Rights and its blatant encouragement of civil rights violations at colleges:

Thanks partly to OCR stacking the deck, it can be much cheaper for a college to expel a possibly innocent student than to find him not guilty. Even before OCR’s recent rules changes, colleges had massive incentives to suspend or expel students who might be guilty of sexual assault or harassment.

For example, last year, the University of Connecticut settled a Title IX lawsuit by paying $900,000 to a student who alleged sexual assault. In 2009, the University of Arizona paid $850,000. In 2007, the University of Colorado paid $2.5 million. A jury awarded $1 million against the Pine Plains school district to a racial harassment plaintiff. And if students win their Title IX lawsuit, the school also has to pay their attorney’s fees, under a pro-plaintiff rule known as the Christiansburg Garment rule.

Colleges’ financial risks are multiplied by the fact that in addition to being sued by students, OCR can cut off all their federal funds and student financial aid. OCR doesn’t view itself as being bound by a court’s earlier ruling rejecting a student’s harassment lawsuit, and it argues that the standard of culpability is less in an administrative investigation.

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