The UC Irvine Office of Student Conduct has released its findings in a case that saw UC Student Regent Jesse Cheng arrested — and then released without charges — last fall.
Cheng was accused of attempted rape last October by a woman with whom he had previously had a relationship. He was arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor sexual battery a few weeks later, but the district attorney’s office declined to bring charges.
Now, however, the UCI Office of Student Conduct has found that Cheng engaged in “unwanted touching” of a sexual nature, and placed him on probation.
Cheng denies the charges, and says that emails he sent to the accuser in which he admitted to, and apologized for, sexual assault and attempted rape were written under duress, at the accuser’s request. “She was calling me 50 times a day for two hours on the phone a day,” he said last month. “I was extremely stressed out. So I lied in the e-mails to do whatever I could to move forward with my life.”
Cheng has said that he does not intend to step down from his seat on the Board of Regents before his term ends this summer, but one feminist organization plans to hold an action at this Wednesday’s regents meeting to demand that he be removed from the board.
Monday Update | The Daily Cal has a story out this morning that suggests that Cheng’s continued service on the Board of Regents may be in doubt. The paper also reports that the chair of the Board of Regents has requested a review of the Office of Student Conduct’s procedures, followed by a meeting of the board’s Committee on Governance “to determine what action, if any, is warranted.” In an email to the paper, the chair went on to say that “students will continue to have representation by Student Regent-designate (Alfredo) Mireles” while the above process was playing out, a statement that seems to imply that Cheng is currently under some sort of formal or informal suspension from the board. Cheng himself declined to comment to the Daily Cal on his status as Student Regent or whether he will be in attendance at Wednesday’s board meeting.
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March 13, 2011 at 4:51 pm
reclaimuc
http://reclaimuc.blogspot.com/2011/03/osc-and-rape.html
March 14, 2011 at 2:10 pm
reclaimuc
hi angus, what do you think about the relative sanctions against cheng (and others who faced charges of sexual assault) and student protesters? probation is much less than the sanctions for wheeler occupiers, for example.
March 14, 2011 at 2:59 pm
Angus Johnston
That’s a good question, RUC. Here’s my take:
First, the sanctions against the protesters are to my mind obviously way too severe. As I’ve written in the past, I consider much of the conduct that university officials have punished (with both criminal and judicial sanctions) to be entirely legitimate campus speech, for starters. In those cases, ANY punishment is too much. And even where some punishment might have been defensible, UC has made a habit in the last couple of years of going way overboard.
So there’s that.
As for the current case, I guess I have to say that I don’t know enough about it to speak definitively. Cheng apparently admitted to attempted rape and sexual assault in an email to his accuser, and if admission was the basis of the Conduct Office’s ruling, then probation seems like far too light of a punishment.
But of course Cheng now denies that he was speaking truthfully in that email, and they ultimately didn’t find him guilty of rape or sexual assault, but of “sexual battery,” a lesser charge.
So where does that leave us? I don’t know. Sexual battery is defined as any unwanted “physical contact … whether … clothed or unclothed” with “an intimate part of another person for the purpose of sexual arousal.” That covers a lot of ground. I don’t know what specifically the university found Cheng to have done, or how they came to that conclusion, and in the absence of that information, I just don’t know how to assess their ruling’s appropriateness with any specificity.
March 14, 2011 at 3:28 pm
reclaimuc
thanks for your thoughts. it’s important to remember the specificity of the charges and the lack of information we have about the case in general. also, we’ve been arguing on our blog for the last year and a half now that the student conduct process is systematically flawed and almost completely arbitrary. those arguments don’t go away just because the case involves sexual assault (or whatever they want to call it — apparently “unwanted touching”?).
what’s maybe more important than cheng’s specific case, though, is the systematic disregard shown at a variety of UC campuses for cases of sexual assault (see the link we posted above for a couple more examples). the argument we’re trying to make is about the purpose of student conduct: is it to make students safer, or to stifle student dissent? obviously it’s not as simple as that, but these cases suggest that the various offices of student conduct (OSCs) across the UC system tend to focus their energy on protesters, while disregarding, ignoring, and even exacerbating the effects of sexual assault and rape.
another anecdote: the occupiers of both wheeler hall and the architects and engineers building at UC berkeley were charged with the following violation of the code, the only provision that deals with sexual assault/rape:
“102.08 Physical Abuse
Physical abuse including but not limited to rape, sexual assault, sex offenses, and other physical assault; threats of violence; or other conduct that threatens the health or safety of any person. (See Berkeley Campus Student Policy and Procedures Regarding Sexual Assault and Rape or the Berkeley Campus Policy on Sexual Harassment and Complaint Resolution Procedures in Appendix I for further information).
Title IX website: http://equity.chance.berkeley.edu/titleix.shtml”
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:b1xx4KudTxUJ:students.berkeley.edu/uga/conduct.asp+code+of+conduct+berkeley&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESh_5lTfNzc9fOKf2VPe2W1mFBbrkQvVNvtQaNp2UKccYjWp-oDpo3UcyVoy8femqMEUlGjC5Ql1KrBarlnywXfhOQ-_GohBRGIAs1Kj5f_7y8o9knA8e-IZ1CaMn7qSiN0bRU5Q&sig=AHIEtbT1HAZNDlBOGknv36uDQVN3trA_Lw&pli=1
March 28, 2011 at 2:15 pm
MM McGee
I couldn’t agree with you more that Student Conduct offices act irregularly. In fact, they act unconstitutionally. Chang was not convicted in court because there was no evidence to convict him. He was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. For Student Conduct to charge him with “Unwanted Touching” specifically (they didn’t even call it battery) is clearly political and that’s all. Do we really have to keep reliving the Calvinist moral hysteria that was Salem and that is, today, gender feminism?
As to your assertion that Student Conduct isn’t doing enough to combat campus rape, I’ll reply: 1) Protecting individual liberties, and individuals from potentially false charges, is far more important than “doing more” about rape on campus. Rape is a crime. There is a criminal process for prosecuting it. If Student Conduct Offices have to exist, they can create all the awareness a budget allows them, but prosecuting rape cases without lawyers present and with no constitutional safeguards for the accused is outside their legal purview, not to mention immoral. 2) Most cases of campus harassment, according to a study released by the Office of Student Conflict Resolution at my University, are non-sexual and are perpetrated by bullying faculty and administrators against their students. When it comes to harassment, administrators and faculty are the primarily problem, not students. But offices of STUDENT conduct do nothing about this very real problem