Thor Halvorssen is the director of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a group which helps students who feel their rights have been trampled, fight back. David Schaer is the victim of one of the most horrible kangaroo courts in existence. These are only the cases we actually have case files for. He says in one year more than 400 students have contacted him for help. There are hundreds of universities out there that have these problems.
Judicial proceedings vary widely from campus to campus.
At private universities, they can set up their own systems. And the constitution does not apply here. Halvorssen says sexual misconduct cases in particular have ratcheted up the controversy ever since a 1990 federal law directed schools to set up procedures to address sexual assault on campus. Most of the time, the people targeted and convicted in these campus courts keep quiet about it. Nobody wants to be known as a campus rapist.