FLASHBACK: Blow Up The Administrative State.

Title IX simply reads: “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.” That’s all.

But from this small, simple statement — there shall be no discrimination on the basis of sex — has been created a regulatory Tower of Babel governing sports teams, student discipline and even, and most dubiously, sexual consent.

One doubts that the members of Congress who drafted Title IX intended to produce what Harvard Law School professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk have called ”bureaucratic sex creep,” in which colleges — allegedly to ensure compliance with Title IX’s non-discrimination mandate — micromanage the sex lives of students, and subject them to Orwellian levels of surveillance, investigation and supervision. In essence, students now risk being kicked out of school for not getting express consent for every sexual act, all based on a law that was intended, four decades ago, to end discrimination in college athletics.

This has been done not because Congress ordered it, or even because the Education Department promulgated regulations with notice to the public and an opportunity for comment. Instead, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights has issued “guidance,” in the form of letters to colleges and universities stating its opinion as to what the law required. And its opinion represents quite a stretch from what Congress intended, and wrote.

And this happens all over. Time to put it to an end.