Last Wednesday, a letter was published in the Boston Globe signed by 28 Harvard law professors voicing strong objections to the school's one-sided, feminist-inspired sexual misconduct policies. Among other things the professors said this: "Harvard has adopted procedures for deciding cases of alleged sexual misconduct which lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process, are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused, and are in no way required by Title IX law or regulation." Read the letter here: http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/10/14/rethink-harvard-sexual-harassment-policy/HFDDiZN7nU2UwuUuWMnqbM/story.html

We wrote about it here: http://www.cotwa.info/2014/10/the-anti-due-process-activists-at.html and here: http://www.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/2jb40r/the_war_on_college_men_goes_too_far_28_harvard/

Today, the Boston Globe ran the following letter:

RE “RETHINK Harvard’s sexual harassment policy” (Op-ed, Oct. 15): While the legal critiques of the Harvard Law School faculty members are critically important, so too, from a psychological perspective, are false sexual allegations by women. Such allegations are dismissed by proponents of affirmative consent policies, who say that women never lie about rape, or who cite a 3 percent to 8 percent rate of false allegations.

A recent summary of the false abuse and rape allegation literature can be found in a 2013 book by Phillip Cook and Tammy Hodo titled “When Women Sexually Abuse Men.” While statistics in this literature are problematic, Cook and Hodo report four studies that found false allegation rates of 62 percent, 41 percent, 50 percent, and 60 percent.

Proponents of these policies also demand an evidentiary standard of “preponderance,” which basically is a coin toss where all a university administrative committee needs to deem a man guilty of sexual assault and expel him is a smidgen above 50 percent.

This “preponderance” standard raises the likelihood that a college male who engaged in consensual sex will be wrongly convicted and expelled. Once this happens, that college male has no future.

Fair?

Gordon E. Finley

Miami

The writer is professor emeritus of psychology at Florida International University.