From: Bettina Arndt
Sent: Friday, 29 November 2019 9:21 AM
To: Bettina Arndt <Bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au>
Subject: Hurrah! Today Education Minister will tell universities to stop adjudicating rape
Hi Everyone,
Red letter day! Our Education Minister Dan Tehan will today tell TEQSA, the university regulator, that universities need to stop adjudicating rape on campuses.
He’s set to speak at the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency annual conference in Melbourne where he will announce that the criminal justice system, not a university discipline process, is the right place to deal with alleged crimes that take place on campus or in the student community.
“Universities have a duty of care to their students and that includes ensuring processes around the enforcement of any codes of conduct are legal, fair and transparent,” he will tell the conference.
“If a student alleges they are the victim of a crime then our criminal justice system is the appropriate authority to deal with it,” Mr Tehan says.
Tim Dodd, the Higher Education editor for The Australian who has been given access to Tehan’s planned TEQSA speech, writes today that Tehan’s speech follows a decision by a Queensland Supreme Court judge last week that barred the University of Queensland from holding a disciplinary hearing into allegations that a final-year male medical student sexually assaulted a female student last year.
Dodd summarised that ruling as follows: “Justice Ann Lyons ruled last week that the university was restrained from going ahead with the hearing on the basis that the allegations against the student “were in fact allegations of criminal offences of a sexual nature”. “This is not just an action by the university about breaches of its rules, policies and procedures,’’ Justice Lyons said. “It would indeed be a startling result if a committee comprised of academics and students who are not required to have any legal training could decide allegations of a most serious kind without any of the protections of the criminal law.”
Dan Tehan will announce that education providers “need to take great care when considering disciplinary action in relation to allegations of criminal conduct, to ensure that the protections afforded to individuals responding to those allegations are not infringed. These are complex matters and there is substantial legislation, case law and legal precedent available to anyone accused of a crime.”
Isn’t this wonderful? Finally we have an education minister willing to take on the small but noisy group of activists who managed to bully the entire higher education sector into pursuing this path, which has had such disastrous consequences for colleges in America, with over 200 successful legal cases of young men suing over the universities’ failure to protect their legal rights, and thousands of accused young men being thrown out of colleges after biased, “believe-the victim” judgements by college tribunals.
Let’s see if university administrators will now come to their senses. Not much sign of that from USyd’s Vice Chancellor Michael Spence. I’ll attach a letter he had published in The Australian yesterday. How does this man, who received a salary package of 1.53 million last year, get away with being so blinkered and inept. Why are the University’s academic lawyers silent about this dangerous nonsense?
We need to put pressure on universities to get real and realise feminist activists need to relinquish control of the sector and allow universities to get on with providing education rather than controlling people’s private lives. Please talk to any academics and administrators you know, or write letters to your local university. The activists are bound to be fighting fiercely against this advice from Tehan. Universities need to know the silent majority demands they get their act together. And Tehan needs your support.