Biden’s Giant Leap Backward on Title IX

Here is an excerpt from a new article on the common sense changes to Title IX that occurred under the Trump Administration that are being reversed by the Biden Administration.  This article is titled: "Biden's Sex Police: The White Houses's new regulations will gut due-process rights for college students accused of sexual misconduct." It appears at Bari Weiss' excellent Substack, Common Sense.

The new rules recommend a return to a “single investigator” model that was barred under the DeVos reform. This means one administrator can act as detective, prosecutor, judge, and jury on a Title IX complaint. The new rules also undo many of the procedural protections for the accused—including the right to see all the evidence, inculpatory and exculpatory, gathered against him. “It’s an evisceration of the procedural protections given to the accused,” says historian KC Johnson, co-author of The Campus Rape Frenzy: The Attack on Due Process at America’s Universities.

Under the DeVos rules, adjudication of a formal complaint required a live hearing be held that included cross examination. The Biden administration lifts this obligation. The Biden rules also call for a return to investigations initiated by third parties, even if based on rumors or misunderstandings, in which male students can be subjected to Title IX proceedings over the objection of their female partners. (Robby Soave at Reason has a good summary of the Biden proposals.)

“It’s a document that validates all of the concerns we had about due process and free speech being on the chopping block,” says Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He adds that the administration is giving schools the blessing of the Department of Education “to cut many corners that are essential for fundamental fairness.”

As vice president, Biden made clear that campuses were just the first stop in an effort to remake throughout society how males and females interact. He said in a 2015 speech at Syracuse University about sexual misconduct, “We need a fundamental change in our culture. And the quickest place to change culture is to change it on the campuses of America.”

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Biden’s Department of Education Attempts to Deploy Third-World Title IX Regulations in American Colleges

From FIRE:

Today, the Department of Education proposed new Title IX regulations that, if implemented, would gut essential free speech and due process rights for college students facing sexual misconduct allegations on campus. As required by federal law, the department must now solicit public feedback before the pending rules are finalized.

The draft regulations are a significant departure from current Title IX regulations. Unlike the current regulations, adopted in 2020 after 18 months of review, the new regulations would roll back student rights by:

  • eliminating students’ right to a live hearings
  • eliminating the right to cross-examination;
  • weakening students’ right to active legal representation;
  • allowing a single campus bureaucrat to serve as judge and jury;
  • rejecting the Supreme Court’s definition of sexual harassment in favor of a definition that threatens free speech rights;
  • requiring colleges and universities to use the weak “preponderance of the evidence” standard to determine guilt, unless they use a higher standard for other alleged misconduct.
  • These changes authorize or require institutions to violate fundamental student and faculty civil liberties.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression will submit its formal objections to the proposed changes in the coming weeks. Moreover, FIRE is committed to using all the resources at its disposal to ensure that core American freedoms, such as a student’s rights to free speech and due process, are not abandoned by the federal government.

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How to Respond When a Public School Sues its Students for Not Using Vanity Pronouns of other Students

Fair spoke up for the students who were sued by the Kiel Middle School in Wisconsin. Here's an excerpt for the letter FAIR sent to the school:

By initiating proceedings against students for not using the alternative pronouns of others, Kiel is not simply punishing them for protected speech; it is compelling them to affirm ideological beliefs in violation of their First Amendment rights. Pronoun declarations are not value-neutral statements such as name and age. They are politically loaded and premised on a specific set of ideological beliefs: that pronouns refer to gender and not biological sex, that one can be neither male nor female, and that gender is a matter of personal choice rather than a biological condition.

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