Feminism is religion at USC. The southern California institution is just another example of an American university eaten alive by cultural Marxism. Luckily, Male Defender has a spy there. We’ll call him X. X sent us a dossier on Title IX practices at the college. Thanks go to Tim Patten who alerted us about the young man. Let’s allow him to tell the Title IX story for himself.
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Title IX has become increasingly controversial in post-feminist America. The creation of a gender-based quota system in the distribution of athletic scholarships has led to a decline in athletic opportunities for men, but the main controversy stems from a small band of militant feminists pushing Alexander v. Yale (which yoked sexual harassment claims to Title IX theory) to its logical extreme, an effort crystallized in the 2011 Dear Colleague Letter.
Like all extremists in history, these “activists” have little concern for the welfare and happiness of the vast majority.
The 2011 DCL sought to favor accusers and penalize the accused by depriving the latter of important legal protections and shielding the former under a general metaphysical principle best known as “trauma theory.”
Many institutions in the nation have already undergone two waves of legal push-backs, first from female complainants and then from male respondents, both groups citing Title IX to defend their civil rights.
Generally speaking, the 2011 DCL has created two legal camps: the “orthodox feminist” camp and the “due process” camp. The “orthodox feminist” or “campus feminist” camp relies upon a Manichean view of the sexes: men are aggressive demons whereas women are virginal angels whose virtue depends on their passivity. In this theory, all sex is rape unless proven otherwise.
Campus feminists rely on an increasingly institutionalized interpretation of feminism to defend what they perceive to be the rights of the only class of human beings who can experience violence, i.e. women.
The “due process” camp is a loose alliance of libertarians, men’s rights activists, and criminal defense lawyers. Generally speaking, they cite freedom of speech and due process to defend their position and criticize the Obama administration for what they view as unlawful overreach.
There is a general consensus among conservatives that the “pendulum has swung too far” in the other direction as far as Title IX is concerned: what was formerly labelled “rape culture” on campuses should better be viewed as a moral panic, similar to Salem Witch trials.
Generally speaking, most colleges have acted in a manner which follows the natural trajectory of legal developments, with some notable exceptions. In some institutional environments like Baylor University or the University of Alaska system, one can still speak of a hostile environment against female complainants, but such pockets of provincial resistance are rare.
There are also some institutions that seem to have gone far beyond the requirements of the Obama doctrine of Title IX in order to penalize any male accused of sexual misconduct. The Department of Education has already condemned Wesley College for bias against the accused while opening investigations against other institutions, such as Cornell University or the University of Southern California, for potential anti-male bias.
The legal case against the University of Southern California is complex and massive. The dossier contains at least eight lawsuits pending at the Superior Court, all by male respondents who have contested the fairness of their sanctions.
Among these lawsuits, one of them is final: Doe v. University of Southern California.
Here, USC attempted to suspend a male student not because he was accused of rape but because he did not stop a different male from committing “sexual assault,” the assault in question being an instantaneous butt-slap that happened during consensual group sex.
The Second Court of Appeals sided with Doe and particularly condemned the institution for using hearsay instead of material evidence; the verdict was written by Audrey B. Collins, former Chief Judge of the Central District of California.
Other lawsuits are ongoing, but it is worth noting that USC’s lawyers have terrorized the independent conscience of the Court with the prospect of potentially violent protests against judges if they were to rule against the institution.
Nor can the University ever defend its actions by saying, “we were applying gender-neutral laws.”
The University has been in legal trouble with the Department of Education for dismissing the sexual assault complaint of a male student, filed against a female martial artist.
So, the question is – why does USC sustain such a hostile atmosphere against male students despite so much legal trouble? Back in 2013, USC found itself under attack by an alliance of orthodox feminists.
Celebrity lawyer Gloria Allred, who uses sexual harassment claims for her political agenda, filed a federal complaint with the Department of Education on behalf of Tucker Reed, a campus feminist who claimed her rape accusation was unjustly dismissed.
Reed waited for +700 days before coming forward with her claims, which wonderfully coincided with her boyfriend breaking up with her; she was pregnant with the lovechild of the accused man after the alleged incident.
She was hospitalized due to mental health issues; it is also worth noting that Tucker Reed murdered her uncle after a property dispute in the summer of 2016. Gloria Allred’s complaint specifically asked the Department to go beyond the already excessive victim protections adopted in the Resolution Letter with the University of Montana; careful reading of the complaint reveals the assumptions inherent in radical feminist dogma.
For example, Allred insisted that 99% of all sexual predators are men while repeating the oft-cited and much-rebuked “1 in 4 women are raped in college” statistic. Neither claim can be taken seriously anymore. Allred nevertheless insisted that USC should monitor the student population until at least 40% of all rapes were reported and disciplined under Title IX theory.
If 1 in 4 women are raped and if USC has 20,000 female students, Allred’s proposed “gender concentration camp” model would have the University prosecute/punish approximately 1,000 male students every year.
At any rate, USC was facing a public relations nightmare in the form of Reed’s jihad. In addition, USC’s lawyers are astute enough to note that Title IX lawsuits filed by women lead to six-figure settlements while due process complaints filed by men receive far more modest settlements.
Also, administrators perceived as “anti-male fanatics” are far less likely to suffer career-ending negative publicity than persons perceived as “rape apologists.”
There are also more parochial reasons behind USC’s anti-male culture, such as institutional investment in the most blasé form of identity politics and the fact that the area surrounding the University Park Campus has been undergoing gentrification.
The neighborhood has a high crime rate; gang violence and murders are not unheard of. This is a cause of ongoing embarrassment for an institution which demands the highest tuition rates in the nation. Supercilious hysteria about general campus security also infects Title IX proceedings.
USC is currently using an eccentric version of the single-investigator model. In this system, a Title IX investigator collects and reviews the evidence and writes a report which also formulates whether misconduct happened or not.
In other words, one person assumes both investigative and adjudicative responsibility, while also acting as police and prosecutor. The report is then relayed to Panel E, who decide whether any sanctions would be appropriate. The decision is then relayed to the Appeals Panel, who arrive at a final conclusion.
This system may seem like a multi-tiered and neutral approach but the illusion unravels under closer scrutiny. Much of the investigative/adjudicative power is concentrated in the hands of two extraordinarily biased individuals at the Title IX Office, Kegan Allee (Assistant Director) and Gretchen Means (Title IX Coordinator).
They dictate the particulars of the report and actively seek to manipulate Panel E’s decision. Panel E is indeed the most reliable and neutral component of the disciplinary system because they come from a random pool of reasonable persons.
They do not partake of the same culture of bias and they do not understand the financial stakes involved. For example, Kegan Allee attempted to dissuade the OCR complainant from filing a harassment complaint against a female student and wrote a highly incriminating report against him, but it seems Panel E issued the most symbolic punishment possible because of the obvious inconsistencies and bias in her report.
In a different case, Panel E was evenly split on whether to expel John Doe despite a highly biased report. The last phase of the system, the Appeals Panel, is highly ineffective: they rubber-stamp the decisions served in front of them. Ainsley Carrey, who currently leads the Appeals Panel, was involved in the Auburn University decision which found Joshua Strange guilty of rape despite exonerating evidence. The falsely accused student was later vindicated.
Based on this dialectic, we can conclude that USC’s system is unfair to the extent that it incorporates the single-investigator model and fair to the extent that it incorporates the hearing panel model.
The single-investigator model is an embarrassment to everyone involved. That a single person should have unlimited investigative, prosecutorial, adjudicative powers over such sensitive and life-altering decisions is absurd.
In USC’s case, the two individuals in charge have significant ideological and financial incentives to incriminate young men no matter what. Kegan Allee’s investigative strategy begins and ends with the question: “What can I do in this case to benefit the woman and harm the man?”
A detailed analysis of her investigative practice reveals bias at every stage. For example, she engages in dissuasion towards male students who want to file sexual harassment complaints against women, while seeking to maximize the punishments against men (even in wrongful/trivial accusations.)
Her interpretation of the affirmative consent standard is fundamentally sexist. For example, despite her claims of victim advocacy, she is wonderfully capable of turning into a rape apologist when a male student accuses a female student of sexual violence.
As for Gretchen Means, she is a former prosecutor who specialized in sex crimes during her eventful tenure at the San Diego DA Office. Her bias is less ideological and more professional, but multiple individuals have raised concerns about her integrity and neutrality.
For example, after she has engaged in verbal sexual harassment against a male student by ridiculing his appearance and calling him a “motherfucker,” she denied making the comments in Court papers (despite acknowledging her “use of profanity” in an e-mail).
Needless to say, a male administrator to utter such words against a female student would have been relieved of her duties immediately. The University received protest e-mails after her ugly behavior, but no action has been taken. Other individuals have also testified against Gretchen Means, citing her lack of credibility.
The damage caused by these self-serving campus zealots is significant. They have already destroyed the lives of multiple star athletes, including Bryce Dixon and Matt Boermeester.
Their archaic “women cannot commit crimes” mentality, coupled with their “always believe the woman, even when evidence says otherwise” policy, has created a systematic pattern of invidious and blatant discrimination.
The enrollment rate for male students at USC has dropped down to 45%, an unprecedented low, for 2016-17.
Many male students have confidentially reported that they had to deal with Title IX terror during their education at USC – which led them to experience ostracism, negative mental health, and dropping grades even in situations which did not lead to suspension and expulsion.
The fact that there are eight lawsuits and an unprecedented Federal investigation should speak for itself; since many students fear retaliation and/or cannot afford legal counsel, this number is only a minor fraction of the male victims harmed by Kegan Allee’s campaign of terror.
NOTES
1. Critics have noted that the 2011 DCL contradicted the principle of double jeopardy by allowing accusers to appeal a non-responsible finding while abandoning cross-examination rights, once called “the greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth” by the Supreme Court.
2. There is no clear agreement on what “trauma theory” means. In practice, it is a much-abused principle which is cited to justify even the worst excesses of false reporting, including retroactive withdrawal of consent.
3. There are many prominent feminists, liberal and conservative, who remain critical of irrational Title IX policies. Perhaps the most radical challenge against the system came from Lara Stemple, Assistant Dean at UCLA, whose studies attacked the essentialist man-as-predator, woman-as-victim paradigm. According to Stemple’s studies, men are equally as likely as women to report sexual violence and the majority of men report female perpetrators.
4. Katharine McKinnon, a radical feminist whose theories were influential in the development of current Title IX policy, once famously decreed that women cannot meaningfully consent to sexual activity because they are oppressed by men as a class.
5. The female perpetrator has also filed a victim-blaming complaint against the male complainant, since “he was manipulating[my emotions by telling me that he was never attracted to me” and “I felt he was never attracted to me” and “I felt threatened by the way he was making himself a victim” [verbatim statements].
6. The myth that “all rapists are men” has been sustained for decades due to an archaic definition of rape as “unwanted penetration.”
7. As noted by Stephen Henrick in A Hostile Environment Against Student Defendants.
8. As can be inferred from her citation in a 2013 article, A World According to Rape: “in Allee’s experiences with sexual assault victims, she has noticed that many of them are unaware they have been raped. The victims find excuses to mask rape in college, such as saying that the man was drunk as well” (p. 5).
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