DEVOS’ FOLLY: 120 Pages of Rules Establishing a System That Shouldn’t Exist At All
Ironically, the substance of Title IX, itself is short and to the point.
No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.
Five words have created an industry and expectation that this sentence entitles co-eds to a sword wielded by their college to cut down anything and anyone whose actions, or inactions, fail to vindicate their every emotional hurt. This was done by the very deliberate unilateral fiat of OCR bureaucrats during the Obama Administration, who pursued a series of lies (which became truths in the minds of the afflicted) and cures for those lies based upon a series of “Dear Colleague” letters and explanatory notes whose sole purpose was to compel a foregone conclusion that female students would have a means by which to vindicate their every emotional sexualized harm at the hands of male students… If this characterization seems severe, it is. Catherine Lhamon has won. On the most superficial level, the new regs may have relieved colleges from Lhamon’s mandate, but they keep the existence of a mechanism intact, they permit colleges to continue to deprive male students of due process…the details of adjudication notwithstanding, they keep colleges in the business of sex policing individual students’ grievances.
And because of this, the new DeVos regulations attempt to provide an opportunity to break free of the requirements of the Lhamon demands, while maintaining the basic structure, the basic concept, that colleges must remain in the sex policing business under Title IX. They never had any business being there. They still don’t. We’re now tweaking around the edges of a fundamentally untenable system as if a bell here, a whistle there, will somehow make this work. Lhamon may not have gotten everything she ever dreamed of, but she won by the fact that there are about 120 pages of rules establishing a system that shouldn’t exist at all.
simplejustice.us By Scott H. Greenfield
