Kipnis, who was accused of sexual misconduct because she wrote about sexual harassment, was not initially allowed to know who her accusers were either, nor would anyone explain the rules governing her case. Nor, for that matter, were the rules clear to the people applying them, because, as she wrote in Unwanted Advances, “there’s no established or nationally uniform set of procedures.” On top of all that, Kipnis was supposed to keep the whole thing confidential: “I’d been plunged into an underground world of secret tribunals and capricious, medieval rules, and I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about it,’’ she wrote. This chimes with the story of another academic, who told me that his university “never even talked to me before it decided to actually punish me. They read the reports from the investigators, but they never brought me in a room, they never called me on the phone, so that I could say anything about my side of the story. And they openly told me that I was being punished based on allegations. Just because they didn’t find evidence of it, they told me, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
While the accusers should definitely be believed and given a space to be heard and prosecute their cases, one of the most drastic harms I see here and repeated frequently are Universities sitting as judges and juries for harms that should be tried in the courts.
These cases have been removed entirely from the public social justice system and are tried in a space that is horribly ill-equipped to handle them. This results in tremendous potential for miscarriage of justice.
If universities are going to engage in these sorts of practices, they should at least endeavor to allow all parties to present their sides and provide some sort of restorative justice.
Somewhere I've read and linked to (Reddit?) communities practicing restorative justice in doing these practices. As I recall, it took a lot of work and effort to sort them out, but it also pointed to stronger and healthier communities over time. Why aren't colleges and universities looking into and practicing this if they're going to be wielding institutional power over individuals? Moving the case from one space to the next is simply passing the buck.
