That is our new legal principle, at least at the University of North Dakota:

In a stark demonstration of the failure of campus judicial procedures, the University of North Dakota (UND) has found a student guilty of sexual assault despite the fact that local police refused to charge him with a crime and instead charged his accuser for lying about the incident. Former student Caleb Warner has been banned by UND from stepping foot on any state public campus for three years. Meanwhile, his accuser has been wanted by the Grand Forks Sheriff’s Department for more than a year on the charge of making a false report to law enforcement…

It seems that Uncle Sam – carrying out the liberal mandate – has decided that all colleges receiving federal funds must use a “preponderance of evidence” rather than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard for judging such cases.  In this case it does seem that an accusation is “preponderance of evidence” because if there was something beyond the accuser’s statement it is highly unlike that the regular law enforcement agencies would have charged the accuser with lying, even if they lacked sufficient evidence to convict the accused.  Beyond the outrage of what amounts to a kangaroo court convicting the accused there lies the double outrage in the college’s refusal to reopen the case in light of the charge of lying leveled against the accuser.

In the end, this is the result of all that liberal nonsense about political correctness, “hate crimes” and “zero tolerance”.  In their zeal to enforce liberal ideas, the very concepts of truth and justice have been jettisoned.  It will take extreme legal and political pressure to get the college to reverse course…and even if they are in this case, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll still go forward trying to enforce the liberal view.

How to fix this?  Simple:  prohibit the federal government from setting rules in colleges.  Go ahead and spend federal money if you like, but don’t go dictating how it is to be spent.  In other words, if money is to be spent it had better just be in the form of bloc grants (best calculated on a per-student basis) which is then dispensed to the colleges to use as they wish…scholarships, new facilities, slush funds for the faculty, what have you.  Better to have the money mis-allocated by some schools than to have all schools come under the thumb of liberal fascism.   Most places would use it properly and those which did would swiftly earn the better reputation and thus draw in more students…and thus more funding.  But get Uncle Sam out of it…all he can do is screw it up, as we see here in this case.