Editor’s note: This was the last piece written by the Yale Daily News 2023-2024 Editorial Board. The Editorial Board — an independent body from the newsroom — consisted of 12 undergraduate students representing a variety of backgrounds, interests and perspectives, writing weekly on issues of relevance to the student body.
The Editorial Board has since been dissolved and a majority of previous members of the Board have instead joined the Opinion desk at the News as staff columnists. They will write a joint weekly column about a topic relevant to campus discourse under the name Publius, with their names undersigned. Given the Board’s dissolution, the last piece written by the Editorial Board is being run under the Publius byline.
Content warning: This article describes sexual violence.
SHARE is available to all members of the Yale community who are dealing with sexual misconduct of any kind, including sexual assault, sexual harassment, stalking, intimate partner violence and more. Counselors are available any time, day or night, at the 24/7 hotline: (203) 432-2000.
In November 2018, Yale conducted a disciplinary hearing regarding a rape allegation against Saifullah Khan. The hearing resulted in Khan’s expulsion from Yale. Months before his expulsion, in March 2018, Khan was acquitted of the rape in criminal court. In 2019, Khan filed a defamation lawsuit against his accuser for the statements she made during Yale’s hearing, which was conducted by the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, or UWC. This defamation suit, while not yet resolved, has raised questions about the rights of the accused and the accusers in school discipline proceedings pertaining to sexual misconduct cases across the country. One of these questions is why schools handle sexual misconduct to begin with.
Eliminating UWC hearings would leave students who wish to formally report misconduct with no option but to turn to the criminal legal system. We believe that this would lower already-low reporting rates and disproportionately impact survivors from marginalized backgrounds.
The criminal legal system’s range of disciplinary measures are not always well-suited to survivors’ needs. A supermajority of survivors –– eight in every 10 –– know their abuser personally, according to national data based on more than 230,00 respondents in 2019. This means that a great deal of survivors might not want to see their perpetrator put in prison, handed a criminal record or otherwise punished through criminal legal means. Many student survivors want to continue their education without living in fear of having to confront their perpetrator on campus or want to seek disciplinary measures that are different than those offered by the criminal legal system. Taking away campus Title IX hearings, which are uniquely positioned to offer disciplinary measures like suspension and expulsion without involving the criminal legal system, would narrow survivors’ options and could reduce reporting rates.
The criminal legal system is ill-equipped to provide discipline in a school setting, both because it lacks authority over university policies and because criminal legal proceedings are notoriously lengthy, sometimes taking years to deliver a verdict, by which point the survivor’s education may already have been impacted.
Additionally, many survivors –– particularly those who are undocumented, identify as people of color or come from heavily policed communities –– might feel skeptical of law enforcement’s ability to treat them fairly and compassionately. Eliminating UWC hearings would narrow survivors’ options and could therefore severely lower reporting rates, especially among survivors from marginalized backgrounds.
More generally, Yale has the right to set standards for its community members and enforce sanctions for transgressions within the bounds of the university-student contract. In particular, this extends to Yale’s ability to suspend or expel its students for harm caused to other students, including sexual assault and harassment; to deny this right would be to infringe on a fundamental freedom of contract. Just as plagiarism is not tolerated because it directly contravenes Yale’s values, one should expect that Yale does not tolerate sexual misconduct, nor permit likely offenders to threaten its community.
Even so, the legal complexities of adjudicating disciplinary matters at Yale in 2018 left Khan’s accuser open to retributive lawsuits, before some recent changes in 2021. In June of this year, the Connecticut Supreme Court ruled that although most witnesses in “quasi-judicial hearings” are protected from defamation lawsuits, Khan’s accuser was not protected because procedural issues in Khan’s UWC hearing at Yale in 2018 meant that it did not qualify as quasi-judicial in the eyes of the Court.
At our University, sexual misconduct is handled by both Yale’s Title IX Office and the UWC. Yale’s Title IX Office provides accommodations for parties involved in a wide range of sexual or romantic situations, while the UWC handles disciplinary hearings for sexual misconduct. However, given that Title IX is a federal civil rights law, UWC proceedings that pertain to Title IX-regulated behavior are still subject to federal Title IX rules. This means that when federal regulations change –– as happened in 2020 when the Obama administration’s Title IX rules were replaced by those of the Trump administration –– Yale may be obligated to change some of its UWC procedures.
Since 2018, Yale has made substantial changes to the UWC process, many of which address the issues raised by the Connecticut Supreme Court opinion issued this June. For instance, the Supreme Court took issue with the “lack of meaningful opportunity to cross examine witnesses in real time.” It should be noted that some courts have ruled that cross-examination of the kind discussed in the Connecticut Supreme Court’s decision is not necessary to constitute due process in the school discipline setting — see: 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. However, even by the state Supreme Court’s standards, we believe that the current UWC procedures do provide ample opportunity for cross-examination of each party and their witnesses, particularly for cases concerning Title IX-regulated behavior.
The court also took issue with a lack of “any record or transcript of the proceeding” made available to Khan. However, under the current guidelines, the UWC will maintain recordings or transcripts of the hearings, and keep these records for seven years following proceedings. The recordings will be shared with both parties. As such, with many of the CT Supreme Court’s concerns addressed, and new federal guidance in place, the legal landscape surrounding quasi-judicial immunity from defamation lawsuits is now substantially different than it was when Khan filed his suit in 2019. Anyone considering the UWC hearing process in relation to their own experiences should know that while there is no legal precedent that evaluates the quasi-judiciality of the current system, the hearings conducted in 2023 operate differently than those conducted under the 2018 UWC procedures that governed Khan’s case. These regulations may change again under proposed Biden administration guidelines.
In light of the Khan case’s prevalence in the news, Yale students might feel qualms about engaging in a UWC procedure. The threat of legal battles, defamation lawsuits and ambiguous information places an undue burden on students in already difficult circumstances. With this in mind, we suggest a number of actions to Yale University’s Title IX Office and the UWC.
Yale should provide clear legal information to all parties involved in UWC cases on what the upcoming legal process may look like and the possible outcomes of a UWC proceeding, including answering questions about the potential for future lawsuits. Having the opportunity to talk to an expert on legal implications outside of the direct case is important for students feeling uncomfortable with possible legal consequences during and after their UWC case.
Yale’s silence on the Khan case thus far represents a failure to communicate transparently about institutional mechanisms to address campus sexual misconduct. Though some administrators have been known to claim that public communications about this will incite fear in the community, such a claim completely infantilizes students and faculty, who are well aware of the risks of sexual misconduct on campus.
Moreover, by institutionalizing undergraduate advocacy efforts around sexual misconduct education and prevention, including the Communication and Consent Educators program and the Title IX Student Advisory Board, the administration maintains control over the vast majority of student advocacy around campus sexual culture, which allows it to limit discussion of response mechanisms. In addition to clarifying hearing processes, Yale should combine general sex education and consent training with training on protocol and institutions, like Title IX and UWC, that a student survivor might want to access.
For instance, condoms are supplied within each first-year entryway, yet any information concerning consent, sexual assault or institutional support is lacking in these locations. The inclusion of educational fliers or pamphlets with critical guidance on sexual assault resources along with condoms provided in first-year entryways would be a helpful and necessary step. In light of the Khan case, Yale should deviate from its decades-long pattern of prioritizing its own reputation over survivors’ needs. In addition to providing prevention measures, it should also communicate transparently about response processes so that students can feel truly safe from harassment and retaliation on campus.
This piece was written by a two-thirds majority of the members of the now-defunct Yale Daily News Editorial Board. Members of the former body include:
Leadership
Alex Bavalsky, Co-President, Timothy Dwight ‘25
Brooklyn, NY
Nikhe Braimah, Co-President, Branford ‘25
Brentwood, CA
Members
Naina Agrawal-Hardin, Benjamin Franklin ‘25
Ann Arbor, MI
Violet Barnett, Grace Hopper ‘25
Miami, FL
Justin Crosby, Silliman ‘25
Middleton, MA
Josephine Cureton, Ezra Stiles ‘24
San Francisco, CA
Hannah Figueroa Velazquez, Berkeley ‘26
Portland, OR
Michael Garman, Grace Hopper ‘25
Newport, RI
Lauren Hartz, Branford ‘25
Tokyo, Japan
Jack Maketa, Saybrook ‘26
Perkasie, PA
Adam Tufts, Berkeley ‘26
Livermore, CA
Edos Herwegh Vonk, Davenport ‘26
London, United Kingdom
Josephine Cureton and Nikhe Braimah are both Communication and Consent Educators (CCEs). The views expressed in this article represent only their personal opinions, not those of the program or the Yale College Dean’s Office.