Inside Higher Ed notes:

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst acknowledged that it allowed a student who confessed to raping a friend to stay on campus without significant punishment, according to an investigation by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, appearing in The Boston Globe. The university said that its handling of the incident was a mistake. The incident is described in a broader report suggesting that minimal punishments often follow reports of sexual assaults on campuses in New England.

Evidently, it’s a common notion that schools should “punish” rapists themselves. I realize I’m a crazy, bloodthirsty, right-wing law-and-order nut, but I was under the impression that rape is the kind of infraction our society deals with by throwing the offenders in prison.

The Boston Globe’s report coughs up these even-more-disturbing factoids:

The Justice Department grant program encourages schools to train campus disciplinary boards to respond effectively to assault charges, including using “appropriate sanctions, such as expulsion of students’’ who have perpetrated sexual assault.
Schools are not specifically required to tell local police about sexual assaults reported on campus; that decision is left to the victims. Most states require citizens to report felonies, but most college administrators will not unless the victim wants them to, according to Brett Sokolow, a lawyer with the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management.

The Justice Department is in on this? Schools don’t have to report sexual assaults on their campuses?

Part of the problem here may be that many of the incidents schools classify as “rape” are actually no such thing. (The Center’s report itself repeats the ridiculous statistic that one in five college women are sexually assaulted before graduation.) Schools can’t very well report to the police every regretted drunken sexual encounter that occurs on their campuses. But that’s no reason for schools to slap almost all rapists on their wrists — on ten New England college campuses between 2003 and 2008, 240 sexual-assault reports resulted in only four expulsions — and no reason for the Justice Department to advocate such a thing.