The Campus Rape Frenzy

The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities

KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. (View Bio)
Hardcover: Encounter Books, 2017.

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 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.

"The same pair of authors who wrote the definitive study of the shameless persecution of the Duke lacrosse players a decade ago provide a detailed account of the way in which colleges and universities have run kangaroo courts that have grotesquely ignored elementary principles of fair procedure in adjudicating cases of alleged rape." — Michael Burlingame, The Claremont Review of Books

"Beyond the excellent depth of information contained in The Campus Rape Frenzy, it’s an exceptionally well-written book. … The writing here is remarkably clear and compelling. It’s got the sense of reading a novel, in that the anecdotes offered to show how the law changed, like the reduced standard of proof of preponderance of the evidence, draw you in and, like any well-told tale, keep you reading to see how it turned out.... It’s that compelling that you just want to keep reading, to know what happened. This is plain, old great writing…. Come for its meticulous research, accurate details, excellent recounting of the sequence of events that explain how the slide down the slippery slope occurred, and stay for a truly well-written book…. If you want to know how we got to where we are now, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor lay it out for you. This is a book you need to read." — Scott H. Greenfield, Simple Justice

"Those who doubt due process has been degraded in college disciplinary proceedings—and those inclined to believe it but who have yet to acquaint themselves with the hard facts and life-altering consequences of campus justice—should read The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities by KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. The authors of the indispensable Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case have once again performed an outstanding public service. In tale after harrowing tale, they expose 'a system on our nation’s campuses in which accused students effectively have to prove their innocence, often under procedures that deny them any meaningful opportunity to do so.' The authors are anything but partisans. They are not even conservatives. Johnson is a history professor at Brooklyn College who has written abundantly about the betrayal of due process on campus. Taylor is a contributing editor at National Journal and, for more than three decades, has been one of the nation’s preeminent legal journalists. Both, they note, voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. They write in defense of America’s classical liberal heritage, a heritage that increasingly has come under attack by progressives as, allegedly, a tool of institutionalized white male privilege." — Peter Berkowitz, RealClear Politics (Read the full review)

"It paints a disturbing and powerful portrait of the ideologies and disciplinary procedures that reign at this nation’s colleges." — Robert VerBruggen, The American Conservative

"In 1692, the Massachusetts Bay Colony found itself in the grip of a moral panic. Seemingly rational people turned on their neighbors, accusing them of witchcraft. The subjective testimony of children and “spectral” evidence, which only the accusers could see, were the basis for the arrest of more than 140 innocent people. Nineteen were hanged.Today America is in the grip of another moral panic. We’re not afraid of witches but rapists, whom we are told lurk at our nation’s colleges in numbers that render the quad a more dangerous environment for women than downtown Detroit. In The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities, KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor, Jr. dismantle this myth of a campus rape crisis and show how, with alarming frequency, colleges mistreat students accused of assault by failing to allow them any meaningful opportunity to prove their innocence…. At the same time that activists are expanding the definition of sexual assault, university disciplinary committees are systematically depriving accused students of basic due process protections…. As Messrs. Johnson and Taylor show powerfully, the current system has its own victims and ultimately undermines the credibility of actual rape survivors whose cases belong in court, not in Kafkaesque administrative tribunals" — Jennifer C. Braceras, The Wall Street Journal (Read the full review)