The Campus Rape Panic ― How Politicians, Academia, and the Media Railroad the Falsely Accused

In recent years, politicians led by President Obama and prominent senators and governors have teamed with extremists on campus to portray our nation’s campuses as awash in a violent crime wave?and to suggest (preposterously) that university leaders, professors, and students are indifferent to female sexual assault victims in their midst. Neither of these claims has any bearing in reality. But they have achieved widespread acceptance, thanks in part to misleading alarums from the Obama Administration and biased media coverage led by the New York Times. The panic about campus rape has helped stimulate?and has been fanned by?ideologically skewed campus sexual assault policies and lawless commands issued by federal bureaucrats to force the nation’s all-too-compliant colleges and universities essentially to presume the guilt of accused students. The result has been a widespread disregard of such bedrock American principles as the presumption of innocence and the need for fair play. This book will use hard facts to set the record straight. It will, among other things, explore about two dozen of the many cases since 2010 in which innocent or probably innocent students have been branded as sex criminals and expelled or otherwise punished by their colleges. And it will show why all students?and, eventually, society as a whole?are harmed when our nation’s universities abandon pursuit of truth and seek instead to accommodate the passions of the mob.

KC Johnson is a professor of history at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he specializes in recent U.S. political, diplomatic, and legal matters. He has written five books, co-written a sixth, and edited or co-edited six additional books, and has commented widely on higher education matters, both at the Minding the Campus blog and in op-eds for such publications as the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Daily News.

Stuart Taylor, Jr., a highly respected journalist and lawyer, has for 35 years written about a wide range of legal and political issues for the New York Times, American Lawyer Media, National Journal, Newsweek, and, on a freelance basis, for many other magazines and newspapers, while appearing in hundreds of TV and radio interviews. He also taught at Stanford Law School in 2011 and 2012.

Taylor and Johnson co-wrote the critically acclaimed Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case (Thomas Dunne Books, 2007).