F.I.R.E.’S ROBERT SHIBLEY TAKES A VICTORY LAP: A Victory for Campus Justice: The Education Department’s new Title IX rule will make university kangaroo courts a thing of the past.
With accusations of sexual misconduct front and center for the second presidential election in a row, it may be hard to believe that the U.S. is making progress on this serious issue. But on Wednesday, the Education Department brought Americans a step closer to having such allegations tried more thoroughly and fairly—at least on college campuses.
More than a year after issuing a draft rule, the department released final regulations on how colleges and universities must treat students involved in disciplinary procedures under Title IX, the federal law that bans sex discrimination—and has been interpreted to include sexual misconduct—in federally funded education programs. Institutions will finally have to guarantee due process for students caught up in campus kangaroo courts.
Consider the presumption of innocence. The most recent survey of due process protections at U.S. News’s top 53 national universities by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education determined that 72% of them—including Georgetown and Caltech—didn’t explicitly tell accused students that they are presumed innocent until proven guilty. The new rules will correct this abuse.
Current law requires campuses to investigate even felony-level sex crimes like rape and sexual assault; they may not simply be turned over to police and courts. Yet university investigations and hearings under Title IX lack thoroughness and impartiality. Students struggle to navigate proceedings without the rights to receive written notice of the exact charges, to see all relevant evidence (including exculpatory evidence), to cross-examine accusers and witnesses through a lawyer or other adviser of one’s choosing, and even to a live hearing.
None of these protections are unusual off campus. All are routinely denied on campus. More than 40% of top colleges don’t even specify that their equivalents of judges and juries must be impartial. This madness will end when the rules take effect.
Basically, nothing that is done on campuses comes from the text of Title IX. It’s the product of judicial and administrative expansions that go inexcusably far beyond the language of the statute. It should all be overturned.