ASHE SCHOW: Title IX Needs Reform.
The anti-discrimination law known as Title IX is meant to protect students from gender-based discrimination, but it has been used over the years to perpetuate it.
“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,” states the law’s preamble.
Originally passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, Title IX was mostly used to increase opportunities for women to participate in sports. It quickly became used as a tool not for gender equity but for gender parity. This has been done through bureaucratic “clarifications” issued by the Department of Education — which are not subject to congressional approval, even though they impose new requirements for federally funded higher learning institutions. . . .
That deficiency came to light at Amherst College recently, when an accused student was expelled, then later acquired text messages from the accuser showing their encounter had not been a sexual assault at all. He only saw those text messages after hiring a lawyer to sue the school for his expulsion. When the student presented Amherst with the newly-discovered text messages, the school refused to reopen his case, claiming they had a fair process.
That “fair” process did not allow the accused student to cross-examine his accuser except for pre-approved questions that he couldn’t follow up on. He was also assigned an “adviser” who was clearly not on his side.
This “fairness” prompted Fox News analyst Brit Hume to opine Tuesday night: “Why would Amherst say after this travesty … that the proceedings were fair under government regulations? Because under the government regulations, they may have been fair.”
And therein lies the problem. The process schools must follow under Title IX is fundamentally unfair and needs to be changed to provide students with the same due process rights they would have in a criminal trial. After all, sexual assault is a crime.
It is more realistic to reform Title IX than it is to repeal it, or even — at this point, anyway — to require schools to hand such investigations over to the police. Sexual assault is a serious matter, and it needs to be treated as such — that means treating it like the crime that it is, and that means both taking accusers seriously and providing protections for accused students who stand to have their lives ruined by a process that is currently designed to do just that.
We could just repeal it. It’s not as if colleges are old boys’ clubs these days.