If you want to entrench a government policy, make sure someone’s job depends on enforcing it. Even if that person isn’t a true believer in the program initially, she will be by the time her first paycheck arrives – and increasingly after that. That’s certainly the case with the education system’s Title IX coordinators, who are charged with overseeing schools’ compliance with federal sex discrimination statutes and questionable regulatory dictates. 

What do Title IX coordinators do? Their core job duty, at least in theory, is to monitor their institution’s compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which helps ensure that institutions receiving federal money do not tolerate sexual harassment that effectively bars the accuser’s access to educational opportunity.

However, under Obama/Biden’s Dept. of Education, regulators’ zeal for stamping out sexual harassment has warped enforcement in ways that violate students’ free speech and due process rights. Fortunately, the Trump administration has withdrawn some of the worst guidance documents and issued binding regulations that should discourage schools from curtailing students’ fundamental rights. However, there is at least one more problematic Obama-era Title IX guidance remaining on the books. In 2015, Catherine E. Lhamon describes at length, the procedures that federal funding recipients must follow in employing Title IX coordinators. 

The term “coordinator” appears nowhere in Title IX itself. Yet onto this slender bureaucratic reed, the Obama administration engrafted a complex regulatory regime that essentially created privately administered “sex bureaucracies” within every funding recipient’s management.

Under pressure from this guidance, many colleges and universities expanded their Title IX offices. Harvard University has by my count 58 compliance staff members. Yale University has 22. Even tiny liberal arts colleges have significant Title IX offices: Middlebury has one main Title IX coordinator and six deputies; Amherst has one coordinator and six deputies; Haverford has one and eight deputies. As these offices have grown, staff duties have expanded to include work going beyond ensuring compliance with the law and instead promoting the “spirit” of Title IX. One Swarthmore coordinator noted to the media that these “jobs are really not just about compliance anymore, but also about campus climate.”

The Trump administration has made a priority of restoring the rule of law and stopping agency abuse of guidance documents: a 2019 executive order lays out procedures for transparency in issuance of guidance documents and restricts executive agencies’ unlawful issuance of guidance documents. In 2018, Associate Attorney General Rachel Brand issued a memo prohibiting Department of Justice components from issuing guidance documents that effectively bind the public. 

The Trump administration should follow through on its commitment to pull back overreaching guidance and repeal this problematic document, in order to rein in the Title IX coordinators and their abusive sex bureaucracy.

thehill.com/opinion-Alison Somin

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Like most people in Washington, D.C., and other major cities, Betsy DeVos is doing her job remotely, communicating with her staff at the Department of Education through phone calls and video conferences. And oh, yeah: DeVos just revealed a new order on sexual harassment with ramifications for every corner of the country. It may very well shift the balance of campus culture — and perhaps beyond.

She said that getting into the weeds on sexual assault was not something she had thought would become perhaps the issue that defines her legacy. “By the time I was confirmed, that was certainly high on the list,” she said of the “Dear Colleague” letter.

“It wasn’t so much the letter itself,” DeVos said of her gut reaction to the fallout from what had become the new normal for students, mostly young men, facing allegations of sexual misconduct. “It was the implications of what the letter actually resulted in, and, you know, at the beginning of this process, sitting with a number of groups of individuals, of survivors who told their stories, of those who were falsely accused who told their stories, and then with college administrations and chief legal counsel and those who were charged with actually running these processes, it was heart-wrenching to hear some of the stories that I heard.” DeVos said the listening sessions with both survivors of sexual harassment and the wrongfully accused were sobering experiences. “I remember after one of them, I just had to have some quiet and space just to sort of think through and reflect on what I heard,” she said. “It was hard. It was very difficult.”

After the department reined in the guidelines in 2017, DeVos and her team began the process of drafting new ones, this time going through the legal channels that would give her rule changes the force of law, which the previous ones did not have. Immediately after DeVos announced the rule change, the Biden campaign released a statement denouncing it as an attempt to “shame and silence” sexual abuse survivors. He promised a “quick end” to it should he be elected.

DeVos’s rule changes, among other things, aim to correct what she said was a botched attempt at social engineering. “Surprising to me was when coming in just how evident it was that the previous administration had been, not only on this issue, but a host of issues, just on an epic power trip,” she said, “and were trying to inculcate every piece of their view of how culture should be into every policy of that department.” The Obama administration, with Arne Duncan as education secretary, “clearly laid the groundwork for the #BelieveAllWomen movement,” she said, “and I think you can draw a direct line from that to the whole Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, and I don’t think that was a mistake. I think that was intentional.”

The rule changes offer a clearer definition of “sexual harassment.” The changes also lay out a process for school administrators to adjudicate sexual harassment claims, mandating a live hearing on the allegations and the right of the accused to submit evidence and witnesses as a defense. Accommodations are made for victims who do not wish to face the accused, but it is now built into the process that those facing allegations of harassment have ample opportunity to make their case.

washingtonexaminer.com-Eddie Scarry 

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