TO CRIPPLE The Abusive Campus ‘Sex Bureaucracy,’ Rein In Title IX Coordinators
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 Fortunately, the Trump administration has withdrawn some of the worst guidance documents and issued binding regulations that should discourage schools from curtailing students’ fundamental rights.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
