JUDGE Approves Title IX, Due Process Claims By Accused Male Against University of Iowa
A federal judge cited potential anti-male bias in the University of Iowa’s Title IX training, and its omission of exculpatory evidence in a Title IX proceeding, in refusing to dismiss a lawsuit by an expelled student.
U.S. District Judge Rebecca Goodgame Ebinger, who has ruled against other Iowa universities in two similar lawsuits, also said defendant officials have no right to “quasi-judicial immunity” for their actions in the proceeding.
The university provided “no support” for its claim that Title IX officials in higher education need such immunity because they are “frequently sued” by participants in sexual misconduct proceedings. It also did not explain how such suits prevent officials from doing their jobs “in a forthright manner,” she wrote in an order last month.
According to John’s account, university officials went beyond simply finding him responsible for sexual assault after a Title IX proceeding. Compliance officer Constance Schriver Cervantes in the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity banned him from campus before he even got a hearing, an interim sanction that was “discriminatory, objectively unreasonable, arbitrary, and capricious.” Tiffini Stevenson Earl, another compliance officer, “discounted and withheld” exculpatory evidence.
Judge Ebinger was particularly dismissive of the university’s argument that its officials deserve “absolute immunity,” a shield against accountability that not even “high school administrators” enjoy under a 45-year-old Supreme Court precedent. Title IX proceedings are nothing like those overseen by “federal administrative law judges” and more like those overseen by a “federal prison’s discipline committee,” where the members are prison employees and the proceedings lack common procedural safeguards, the judge wrote.
Ebinger allowed Title IX and due process claims by “John Doe” to continue while dismissing other claims, including racial discrimination. The lawsuit describes him as a “citizen of a predominantly Muslim South-Asian country” who was born and raised in Kuwait. His two accusers are white women.
thecollegefix.com-Greg Piper
