WHERE TITLE IX Went Wrong: The Equal Opportunity Law That Ran Amok
Title IX, the 1972 legislation banning sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal financial support, was a reasonable equality-of-opportunity law in its original form. So what explains the scorched-earth campaign against men’s sports carried out in its name? Why has it been used to deny students and professors due process and free speech in sexual harassment cases? For the activists, Title IX was not an equal opportunity law; it was a mandate to change conventional understandings of what it means to be a man or a woman. When a Massachusetts district court judge reviewed Brandeis University’s Title IX–inspired harassment proceedings, he declared them “closer to Salem 1692, than Boston 2015.” How did we get here?
In his new book, The Transformation of Title IX, Boston College political science professor R. Shep Melnick provides the answer: the transformation happened slowly and incrementally and involved a strange symbiosis between government officials, federal judges, and activists. Melnick shows, how OCR officials found a way to rewrite the rules while sidestepping the required “notice-and-comment” process, simply by labeling a modification not as a formal rule change but as a “clarification” or “guidance.” Such changes were then announced as faits accomplis through friendly-but-firm “Dear Colleague” letters. When someone protested, OCR administrators would dig in their heels and insist they had merely clarified what was already in the law.
educationnext.org By Christina Hoff Sommers
