GOOD: Trump Budget Plan Cuts Staffing for Campus Sex Police.
When Donald Trump won the presidential election on an in-your-face anti-PC platform, we speculated about dramatic steps his administration might take to curb the Office for Civil Rights in Education—the federal agency that under President Obama came to be closely associated with campus social justice causes. Possible steps included moving the OCR from the Department of Education to the more institutionally conservative Department of Justice, or even eliminating the OCR altogether.
The administration has so far not attempted this kind of radical shakeup. However, its new budget does put some pressure on the OCR, holding funding constant while cutting back on staffing. Inside Higher Education has a one-sided piece airing criticisms of the proposal from campus sexual assault activists.
The truth, however, is that the OCR is in need of pruning. It has had a major hand in many of the most corrosive trends in higher education since 2011, including due process violations, restrictive speech codes, and bloated administrative staffs—related phenomena that the Harvard Law professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk approximate with the term “bureaucratic sex creep.” The OCR has has stretched the limits of its authority to make campus bureaucracies more coercive and punitive, leaning on them to erect biased “courts” and discipline more students. It’s unclear whether this approach has reduced the rate of campus sexual misconduct, and if so, whether this was worth the harm to civil liberties and academic freedom.
A productive agenda for addressing the campus sex wars would involve legislation clearly delineating the OCR’s authority and requiring (to the extent possible) that police, rather than amateur campus bureaucrats, take the lead in addressing the crime of sexual assault. It would also involve nominating a competent and experienced director to lead the agency responsibly so that it fulfills its mandate to investigate instances of misconduct without infringing on protected free speech or due process rights.
The best thing to do with OCR is to have it issue regulations requiring that sexual assault complaints go to law enforcement, then abolish it.