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Ryan Young

6 min read

Ryan Young is named in the source excerpts for The Bob Zadek Show only in connection with a discussion of campus disciplinary proceedings. The excerpts do not identify him, state his occupation, describe his role in any case, or attribute any statement to him. What follows is limited to what the excerpts actually say.

The campus due process episode

The episode “Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus?” features Bob Zadek interviewing Cathy Young, identified in the excerpt as the author of two books, Ceasefire: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality and Growing Up in Moscow, and as a regular op-ed columnist for the Boston Globe and the Detroit News. The episode concerns her article “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” published in the January 2014 edition of Reason magazine, and the erosion of due process for male students facing sexual assault allegations on college campuses Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014).

Bob Zadek frames the program around the gap between what students learn about constitutional protections and the environment they encounter on campus. He tells listeners that students are deprived of many of the protections the rest of us are afforded, and he describes life on America’s college campuses as the most unconstitutional environments in America. He notes that the article was brought to his attention several months earlier. These are Bob’s framings, not the guest’s.

Cathy Young describes the case of Peter Yu, a Chinese national studying at Vassar, who she says was denied a chance to have an attorney and was forced to cross-examine the young woman himself. She says the case went to a hearing before a panel of three professors, that Peter asked for other students to be included on what Vassar calls an Interpersonal Violence Panel, and that he was denied that request. She says there is no transcript of the hearing, and that according to Peter, every time he began asking pointed questions the young woman would start crying and the members of the panel would say that was enough. She says Peter Yu was expelled from Vassar, that he is now suing Vassar under Title IX, and that he argues the system at Vassar is so biased against males in cases of accusation of sexual assault that it amounts to gender discrimination.

Cathy Young also says the young woman in the case was the daughter of a faculty member, and that the panel members were colleagues of her father in that they were faculty members at the same college. She says the appearance of bias at the very least is definitely there. She describes the consequences of expulsion under this kind of proceeding as a black mark on a student’s record that follows him when he applies to another school or tries to get a job, and says a student is acquiring the de facto equivalent of a criminal record. She mentions a similar lawsuit settled by a college in Ohio, a similar sex discrimination lawsuit at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia, and a basketball player suing a university that expelled him, in a case where she says the prosecutor saw no grounds for filing a criminal complaint for sexual assault.

On the origins of the policies, Cathy Young says the story starts in the 1980s and grew out of a genuine problem, in which colleges swept real sexual assaults under the rug and young women who may have been genuinely assaulted were made to feel it was their fault. She says that when we have these social justice crusades we end up with an overreaction where the pendulum swings so far that it turns into an injustice on the other side. She describes a mindset in a lot of feminism today that there really shouldn’t be a presumption of innocence in cases of sexual assault, and says that when this mindset is applied to these cases on campus it creates a very combustible situation. Bob Zadek says the point of the piece is that for clearly political reasons, and most importantly reasons that emanate from Washington, D.C., there is a wanton disregard of constitutional rights, and that the process has a profound anti-male bias with lifetime detrimental effects on males who get swept into the system.

Other episodes

Two other episodes in the source set do not mention Ryan Young. The episode “Skip Young on The Wisdom of 76” features Bob Zadek interviewing Skipper Young, identified as the author of The Wisdom of 76 and co-founder of Asia SF, about the convergence of political and economic thought in 1776, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, and index fund investing Skip Young on The Wisdom of 76: Young America’s Way to Wealth (2016). The episode “Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List” features Bob Zadek interviewing Sarah Stillman about juveniles on sex-offender registries, sexting, consensual relationships between young adults, recidivism rates among juveniles, and where sexual harm tends to take place Sarah Stillman on Minors on the Sex-Offender List (2016).

Neither of those episodes names Ryan Young. The name appears in the source set only in the campus due process episode, and even there the excerpts do not attach any statement, action, or identifying detail to him.

Across episodes

Only one episode in the source set touches on Ryan Young, so the excerpts show no development across episodes. The campus due process episode is the sole treatment, and the other two episodes concern unrelated subjects and different guests.

What the sources do not cover

The excerpts do not state who Ryan Young is, what he does, where he is from, or why his name appears in the discussion. They do not attribute any statement to him, describe any case involving him, or connect him to any of the lawsuits, statutes, or proceedings named in the episode. They do not establish whether he is a guest, a caller, a subject of discussion, or a person mentioned in passing. Any article about him would require sources the excerpts do not provide.

Episodes

3 appearances, 2019–2020.

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