The Title IX final rules released today by the Department of Education require major and most welcome changes in the procedures used by almost all public and private schools and campuses campuses across the country to investigate and adjudicate alleged sexual assaults and harassment.
The current campus reality is a de facto presumption of guilt, which the Obama Administration demanded and most campuses readily adopted, with minimal procedural protections for accused students and guilt-presuming “training” of investigators and adjudicators. Most campuses have given accused students and their advocates no right to cross-examine accusers and other witnesses – despite repeated Supreme Court statements that cross-examination is the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth.” The campus bureaucrats who have presided over these proceedings are overwhelmingly female and ideologically committed to presuming guilt. Scores of students disciplined for alleged sexual misconduct have won court rulings finding colleges’ procedures unfair and illegal.
The new rules, spearheaded by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, are intended to change all that after they take effect in August – unless stopped by the lawsuits that feminist groups and others are preparing to file. Feminists have furiously attacked the new rules as pro-rape. Adopted after a two-year process including thousands of overwhelmingly hostile comments from colleges, victim advocates, and Democratic politicians — and some positive comments from civil liberties advocates — the rules will give accused students a presumption of innocence and rights of access to all claims by accusers and all available evidence. They also require that colleges (but not K-12 schools) give accused students a right to live hearings at which their lawyers or advocates (but not the accused themselves) can cross-examine witnesses, but not ask about accusers’ sexual histories. They require schools to use the same standard of evidence for accused students as for faculty members, which may force some colleges to use a more demanding standard for proving students guilty than now. They narrow the definition of sexual harassment to match the one used by the Supreme Court.
The new rules require that the campus officials and students handling these cases be trained consistently with the rules and not be biased against either accusers or accused students. The details are complicated, and imperfect in some ways, but the spirit of the new rules is consistent with America’s most hallowed principles.
Related posts:
TESTIMONY OF ROGER CLEGG, PRESIDENT AND GENERAL COUNSEL, CENTER FOR EQUAL OPPORTUNITY BEFORE THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS REGARDING THE PROPOSED EMPLOYMENT NON-DISCRIMINATION ACT
CEO press release on Title IX Regulations on Sexual Harassment
Fisher v. University of Texas Wrap-Up – Whew!Politicized external review panels as unguided “diversity” missiles: California university administrators remain ultra-slow learners