Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day.
“The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.”
Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed.
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They are given due process, including access to lawyers, evidence, and witnesses. They’re even allowed to take the case to court. All public universities are required to offer full due process when expelling students.
Private universities are not required to do so because they’re not run by the government.
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Your question is a little hyperbolic since what your talking about is title IX specifically, not “human rights” in general.
You can read about title IX exemptions here.
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How are they being denied basic human rights?
Title IX is very specific and the organization you refer to, FACE, specifically states their goal in relation to title IX.
I can’t tell if your arguing in bad faith or you don’t understand title IX compared to other laws that would apply.
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I’m not misunderstanding you. I think your struggling to follow your own conversation.
You brought up FACE, an organization concerned with Title IX enforcement specifically.
The other user explained they are given due process (under Title IX) and explained (poorly) that private colleges are not bound by the same rules if they don’t take government funding, expressed as government run.
Then you shifted it to some conversation about basic human rights and questioned what not being government run has to do with.
Which is why I shared the federal government page outlining Title IX exemptions.
Due process is covered under the 5th and 14th amendments, not Title IX.
Remember this:
Where you cited a Wikipedia article about an organization concerned with Title IX to justify your claim they’re not given “due process”.
It’s either bad faith or stupidity. Either way, I’m done engaging with it.
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An anonymous poster posts a story in Reddit…
Due process protects you from the government. You don’t get due process when you get kicked out of a private business or university for misbehaving. They can kick you out for no reason at all.
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Getting fired is life changing yet we accept that we could be fired at any time for no reason here in the US. Protections against getting arbitrarily kicked out of a private university would require legislation. Right now that’s a risk you assume when you go to a private institution versus a public one.
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Actually it’s a pre requisite for being a politician or clergy member.
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What do you think having to drop out of University because of the trauma of being raped does to a person?
So two wrongs make a right? This person had their life horribly disrupted for reason A so an unrelated person should have their life horribly disrupted for reason B?
People should not be subject to arbitrary harm from others and we should be against all forms of it, whether that’s sexual assault, economic coercion or lack of due process.
When universities hide evidence, don’t report to authorities, and otherwise dodge investigating rape accusations, then people aren’t going to trust when they exonerate these men.
This is on the system that protects these rapists.
Due process is also a system that can make things like racism, sexism, nepotism harder. Also outside of universities people often feel like the legal system protects offenders, but it in a well functioning system it also protects them. After all, without due process, rape victims themselves can also be expelled by universities.
And when a legal system doesn’t work, it needs fixing. People fought hard for legal protections to put in place in the first place.
I don’t know about this case, if that is true then its terrible and he should have been arrested, convicted and thrown out of the university. But the larger point stands, denying some people of due process because others are harmed in other ways is not something to strive for.
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Not when universities have the ability to hide evidence and obfuscate real investigations in order to protect these men. Which they have done time and time again.
This is not the best system we have. We can’t even get the police to process rape kits.
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No, innocent until proven guilty is only the bar for the government to lock you up in a cage. It’s impossible for anyone to live their life using that standard.
Then maybe Cornell shouldn’t have impeded a real investigation here.
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Cornell is currently in the news for covering up a gang rape two years ago. It’s come out they withheld evidence from the DA and the police and DA never investigated properly.
Columbia has similar skeletons in their closet.
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You have no idea the conversations you’re actually having in here then.
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This reminds me of a reddit post from a while ago. Dude is going to a university in the US. He’s randomly contacted by campus police to let him know that a student has taken out a restraining order on him. He’s a graduate student, and the student who took out the restraining order is from one of his classes that’s typically for undergrads. Other than sharing that class, he doesn’t know the student. Never even spoken to them. He’s on a student visa, if he’s expelled, he’ll likely be deported. He’s not allowed to speak to the student and campus police won’t even tell him why the restraining order is in place.
After doing some investigation on his own, he finds out the student is dating one of his roommates, who he also doesn’t know very well. The roommate is stalking the student, and another roommate is helping the stalker.
The student who took out the restraining order had seen him with the stalker at some point and, because the class they share is typically for undergrads, assumed he only took the class to keep an eye on the student for the stalker.
He was able to go to his graduate advisor about it and luckily it all got cleared up, the student withdrew the restraining order. But his whole academic career was nearly derailed because a random person was able to take out a restraining order on him with zero direct evidence, and there was no established means by which he could defend himself.
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“Campus Police” are regular police (for all that’s worth), not rent-a-cops. Their jurisdiction is University and University-related policing. Think of the University as being its own city.
I teach nights at a university and UPD is pretty great. The city cops are very much out to get people, whereas the UPD has a very light touch. They’ll bust a party with a bunch of 19yo Kids drinking too much and getting loud, and tell them to keep it down and stay safe, while offering to call a non-police volunteer to drive anyone home for free.
Parking Services (not part of UPD) can get go suck on a tailpipe though. Fuck those guys.
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