UCSB HID Federal Settlement From Judge In Title IX Due Process Loss, Drastically Lowering Its Penalty
The University of California-Santa Barbara hid an agreement with federal regulators from a judge considering how to penalize the university for violating a student’s rights, according to his lawyer, Robert Ottilie. Ottilie asked for $465,000 in “private attorney general fees” about a month after UCSB signed the agreement with OCR. Instead, he got $5,000 on the basis that his client’s win did not help students at large.
The existence of the September 2018 “resolution agreement” with the Education Dept.’s Office for Civil Rights could have led the judge to award “John Doe” hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney’s fees. Instead, Santa Barbara Superior Court Judge Thomas Anderle issued a mild chastisement to the taxpayer-funded institution for running an “arbitrary and unreasonable” Title IX proceeding. Ottilie said that the existence of the agreement shows that UCSB misrepresented the status of the federal investigation to Judge Anderle.
While the investigation found John innocent of the allegations, Ottilie said that his permanent record still reflects an interim suspension from the investigation’s launch in 2016. UCSB did not respond to queries from The Fix on the agreement, which Ottilie obtained through a California Public Records Act request. His appeal of the low fee award is scheduled to be heard by a higher California court this month.
thecollegefix.com-Poff
