Justice Restored? DeVos Suggests Adjustments to Obama Era Title IX Guidelines

Posted by Tina

In 2011 President Obama’s civil rights department issued guidelines in a letter to college administrators to address the issue of campus “rape culture.” In response, College administrators set up what amounts to kangaroo courts to hear rape cases and in the process destroyed the reputations and lives of young men whether they were actually guilty of the crime of rape or not. The guidelines were deeply and blatantly flawed, considering President Obama held a law degree! How could he sign off on such a one-sided approach to resolving accusations of rape when young men on campus were systematically denied basic constitutional rights? As might be expected, lawsuits have been filed and with the election of President Trump a new education secretary, Betsey DeVos, has come forward to recommend changes.

A case at Amherst College exposes the flawed Obama approach. The young man’s story below was later supported by messages found on his accuser’s phone:

On the night of February 4-5, 2012, John Doe (as he is called in the court documents) was so drunk that he “blacked out” and couldn’t remember much about the night, including even his interaction with Sandra Jones (again a pseudonym). The two were making out in a dormitory common area when another student said that they ought to go somewhere private. Jones led Doe to her room, where she performed oral sex on him. Her room was available because her roommate—Doe’s girlfriend—was away. Doe thought little more about that drunken night with Jones until he was dumbfounded to receive a notice from Amherst in December of 2013 that he had been charged with rape. He would have to appear at a hearing in ten days.

After being tried and convicted on campus, John Doe sought the advice of a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against Amherst. The judge found his case could move forward on two important counts:

The first, and I think most important, part of the ruling concerns Doe’s argument that Amherst had a contractual duty to provide all its students with fair procedures in the event of a disciplinary proceeding, and that in his case it failed to abide by that contract. … Second, Judge Mastroianni found sufficient grounds for Doe’s allegation that Amherst was guilty of sexual discrimination against him that the case can proceed. Specifically—and again based on evidence that was presented only after the stacked trial—Doe claims that Amherst treated him differently than it did Jones, because there was at least as much reason to regard her as having committed sexual assault as to think he did. But Amherst ignored the former, leading the judge to conclude that “a court can infer gender-based discrimination may have played a role in the College’s responses.”

Doe’s story is quite extraordinary but it’s only one of many such cases. Additional information on the destructive nature of the Obama era, Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR), guidelines is here.

Trump’s Education Secretary, Betsey DeVos, has issued a statement in response to these gross injustices calling for new guidelines:

DeVos declared that “the era of ‘rule by letter’ is over,” referencing the Obama era set of guidelines laid out in a 2011 memorandum referred to as the “Dear Colleague Letter.” She noted these rules enacted under the Obama administration created a failed system – a system failing both the reporting party (“accuser”) and the responding party (“accused”).

DeVos notably discussed the lack of due process currently afforded to accused students throughout the Title IX process on college and university campuses. She declared that although “one rape is one too many . . . one person denied due process is [also] one too many.”

Although DeVos did not announce specific changes to the Title IX guidelines issued under President Obama, she explained the Department of Education will “launch a transparent notice-and-comment process to incorporate the insights of all parties” in developing a better system.

One proposed idea DeVos discussed was the development of a “Regional Center model” to handle Title IX complaints. As part of this model, participating schools could refer a Title IX incident that rises to the criminal level to the Regional Center. The Regional Center then “cooperates with local law enforcement and has access to resources to collect and preserve forensic evidence, facilitate—but never require—criminal prosecutions, and apply fair investigative techniques to gather and evaluate all relevant evidence to determine whether sexual misconduct occurred.” This model, DeVos noted, “allows educators to focus on what they do best: educate.”

This model, however, was only used as an example, and no formal changes to the Title IX guidelines were issued. After DeVos’ statements, it is expected the Department of Education will issue formal changes soon.

The Obama era guidelines affected other issues on campus. As the informative article from the Competitive Enterprise Institute explains:

This Obama administration demand for regulation of off-campus speech and conduct resulted in absurdities such as a Title IX investigation of Prof. Laura Kipnis for an essay published off campus in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe.” Hypersensitive students claimed the essay constituted “sexual harassment.” The students then accused Kipnis of “retaliation” when she took issue with their charges on Twitter. Only after an outcry from free speech advocates were charges dismissed months later.

As Secretary DeVos noted: Too many cases involve students and faculty who have faced investigation and punishment simply for speaking their minds or teaching their classes. Any perceived offense can become a full-blown Title IX investigation. But if everything is harassment, then nothing is…

The radical left’s grievance culture has chosen to ignore the rule of law and equal protections to advance an agenda and to institute an era of rule by prejudice. He who carries the biggest accusation stick makes the rules. The “rape culture” activists assumed they held the bigger stick and wrote the rules to prove it. They then participated in kangaroo court trials to destroy the lives of young, mostly white, students. But our Constitution and the individual rights and protections guaranteed in it are embedded in our culture and within the rule of law in our nation. And that is the big fat stick that patriotic, law abiding citizens will use to put down the insurgent radicals who seek to wield their prejudicial power to destroy American culture and judicial model.

Let’s hope this change marks a beginning rather than an end in the fight to restore sanity, equity, responsibility, and order on American campuses and within communities across the land.