I found a link to a Title IX website that has a plethora of cases.
I know that Fresno State alumni were in a collective tizzy fit when the university dropped some men’s sports in order to be Title IX compliant during the early 90s. The site above actually lists a federal court case that was settled when Fresno State removed their female A.D. because she was an advocate for gender equality (I think the $3 million+ is a bit small considering the money that the football team rakes in).
Thank you! So interesting, and some of the Title IX rationale is explained.
he American Civil Liberties Union of Connecticut, said it was significant that the judge went beyond just counting male and female athletes at the school.
“The court went on to analyze the quality of competition offered to men’s teams and women’s teams, and found that women at Quinnipiac were not, on the whole, provided with competitive opportunities equivalent to those provided to men,” he said.
“This is one of very few, if not the only, court decisions to address this particular aspect of Title IX’s requirements.”
I think that case is part of their repressed history there. It’s the tip of the iceberg maybe.
The UCs & CSUs seem to be working to narrow their duty to provide confidential reporting of rape on campus by hiring campus based advocates and arguing that they’re covered as “sexual assault counselors” like traditional, independent sexual assault programs.
There doesn’t seem to be appellate authority for that interpretation, but they seem resolved to shifting that and other risks to rape victims.
Universities have been put into a bind by the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter that reinforced the marriage of the Clery Act to Title IX. The reason they’re getting it wrong is that there is no way to get it right; any policy they come up with is going to open them up to criticism, legitimate criticism, from at least one of the parties involved. Of course, they brought it on themselves by not putting more effective policies in place on their own before this pressure came down from above. Between the end of in loco parentis in the 60s until 2011 there was a huge window of opportunity to find a defensible, if not perfect, way to deal with a problem everyone was aware was widespread.
For UC, it doesn’t help that the same campus police to whom students are supposed to turn for help are recently best known for pepper-spraying students in Davis and whapping them with batons in Berkeley.
I’m not able to completely agree with you.
There’s been controversy, yes, but the 2013 administrative rules contain enough procedural clarity to resolve all material questions as to burden of proof, confidentiality, appropriate temporary and permanent remedies and timing.
The more persistent problems are more often better explained by lack of consensus among college stakeholders, administrative insularity and/or lack of relevant professional expertise.
I don’t think that “resolve” is the right word here. These rules give the institutions a set of standards they are required to follow on threat of losing their federal funding, but it doesn’t eliminate legitimate pushback from other stakeholders (and, more recently, judicial decisions) or in any way justify that the remedies and timing are appropriate on the one hand, or adequate on the other.
If your neighbor sues you in your local court for a civil offense, and the court gets it wrong and finds against you, you’re going to grumble but there’s not much you can do short of appeal. If you’ve invested $100k in a university, and they act as court and find against you, you’re going to sue the school. Schools have no sovereign immunity, and have an equal responsibility to protect all innocent students. Whatever the language coming out of the DoE, universities have to try to find a path that both protects the institution and works for all the stakeholders who aren’t criminals…well, that’s impossible, so they have to decide how best to balance the pressures based on criteria of their own. There are people who say, “DoE issued these guidelines, so they win” but that’s hardly an argument, is it? The last Secretary of Education that wasn’t a nincompoop was Richard Riley (and some would say Shirley Hufstedler).
You’re not alone if that’s any consolation. There’s a lot of vague hand-wringing.
It would be better for students, faculty and employees to stay more solution-focused and get ahead of the ball.
Fortunately for me, it is not an area of university operations in which I’ve ever been much involved, and like UC (but not like most schools) my university has the millions to spend on lawyers to create and implement some kind of policy to get compliant; if not, there’s always tuition increases to cover it.
Meanwhile, students can’t turn to a trusted professor for confidential help any more; we’re required to immediately communicate all details to the Title IX office even if the student begs us not to.
The public discussion of this has become a shouting match between MRAs, who against all evidence don’t believe there’s a problem at all, and people who are comfortable with the idea that some crimes deserve more process than others. I think the best reaction to the public discussion is to ignore it altogether, because it is not about problem-solving but about digging in on rigid positions.
If there is a school that has a system in place on harassment and assault that is fair, swift, safe and comfortable for victims to navigate, and reliable in outcomes then DoE should simply mandate that everyone else adopt that school’s system. If not, then accept that as evidence that the balancing act is difficult, and the DoE should work with some schools to create a model system rather than issue a simple royal “make it so”. Such systems should have been in place 40 years ago, and the fact that they were not is a fault in the DoE as much or more than it is in the schools.
It’s complicated.
Professors who permitted students, faculty or employees to disclose SA too often discover that they were never able to offer confidential help in the more important sense of that word.
The current rules provide greater protection for confidentiality by reducing the risk of accidental disclosure to someone who is neither trained to provide trauma-informed support nor able to legally resist a subpoena from a criminal defense, divorce or other civil attorney.
This is a big deal. On the off-chance that a case actually makes it to court, the defense attorney can put a non-official outcry witness on the stand and twist their testimony to the point that they end up helping the rapist instead of the victim. The law protects trained support workers from being subpoenaed, plus they’re trained.
It sounds like you know something about this sort of program. I agree 100% with your description of the risk, and I’ve seen the types of risks you describe realized in awful, harmful ways.
Hey, I’m so sorry. Due to the boneheaded nature of my boneheaded bone head, the way I formatted that post unintentionally made it look like I was quoting the article and attributing that horrific passage to Whitman. Although I am a little impressed with myself that I pulled off ‘old time Puritan creepy asshole’ so convincingly, I feel absolutely mortified that it ended up looking in my post like Walt said that. I edited my post to add clarity, just wanted to apologize to you. 
I was a trained advocate for 5 years until I moved to a different state, many years ago. I’d have to re-do all the training to go back into it, but it’s a possibility when the last kid is out of the house.
I thought so. It sticks with us.
i just love where this conversation went
Isn’t that still a problem if the student talks to friends? These rules just remove the student’s option of speaking to an adult they know and trust.
I’ve not had a student come to me for advice on anything like this for a long long time - a benefit I suppose of being an old white male - but I hate the idea that if one were to do so, the first words out of my mouth would have to be a warning that anything they disclose to me will be reported to another office. (Of course, if a student comes to a faculty member for help, that faculty member should be ready to refer the student to the appropriate people on campus to help them, which among other things means knowing who they are.)
In any event, I thought hello_friends’ objection to the new procedures in CA was the use of independent specialists contracted in from the outside; wouldn’t such specialists make prosecution easier, by putting more of these judgments into the hands of people with the proper training?
That’s exactly the problem: are the “independent specialists” contracted by a university in fact properly trained for the job and thus in compliance with the requirement, or is their hidden mandate to keep the problems from reaching law enforcement and the public?
It’s also a problem when they talk to friends — maybe a bigger problem. However, the rule does not just remove the student’s option of speaking to an adult they know and trust.
The rule restores the student’s choice and reduces her risk of being surprised later by the news that the trusted adult will be compelled administratively or legally to breach the student’s trust without her consent.
Once the student (faculty or employee) knows the risks, then she can decide for herself. She may still decide to talk to the professor as a trusted support person.
But the professor shouldn’t be deciding for her — esp. if we don’t fully understand the issues or the rules or all of the facts of the situation. The injury of sexual assault is an injury to consent. One of our first goals should be to restore safety and consensual trusting relationships.
One option many professors are trained to offer their students prior to disclosure is information about community-based 24-hour crisis lines.
Some add the information to the syllabus so everyone has the needed information at the beginning of class and is equipped during the semester or quarter if a friend or acquaintance also needs it.
With information about the community-based sexual assault program and 24-hour crisis lines, the student (faculty member or employee) has an additional option to choose a professional consultation that is likely to enjoy more legal protection from disclosure until she’s ready to disclose.
The consultation is also more likely to provide accurate information about sexual assault forensic examinations and the victim/survivor’s legal and practical choices. Personal advocacy and support services are also available and can be coordinated with college support services to obtain the remedies that are only available through the college (e.g. changing the perpetrator’s course schedule or housing, suspension or expulsion of the perpetrator, etc.)
As mentioned, she may still choose to confide in the professor and enlist him or her as a support person. I haven’t met lots of professors willing to accept that role. You deserve credit if you’re someone who would accept that role, and you’re willing to learn more about what it means to do so.
A lot of the poster’s suggestions are creepy(including some of the makeup rules), but being an athlete doesn’t always negate makeup entirely either. For example, figure skaters and gymnasts frequently wear makeup during competition.
That’s true that some athletes do choose to wear makeup, tattoos, flamboyant nail polish or unconventional hairstyles, costumes, etc. Some make political statements with armbands or gestures or Tshirts.
I would hope that that would be a basic requirement, and in any event tend to believe that agencies specializing in such counseling would on balance have more understanding of it than staff members at the more than 4000 colleges and universities in the US, most of them too small to afford an independent office of experts devoted to this problem.
What UC does will be watched very closely by every public university in the country, every one of which is trying to decide how best to address this problem, as well as every advocacy group in the country. If it doesn’t work, it won’t be a secret.
I certainly don’t disagree with any of this, except perhaps the pronoun in the first sentence.
I do think it is unfair to UC or any campus on the one hand to pressure them to change their system, and then when they do change it to accuse them of doing it for nefarious reasons. I also think that when we have recognized that campus authorities are rather bad at dealing with Title IX issues, especially when there are suggestions of fiduciary conflict-of-interest, it is inconsistent to then complain when they experiment with outsourcing some of them to autonomous specialists. While I’m usually the last person to defend the motives of campus administrators, in this case Occam’s razor suggests that they are trying to do their best to solve a difficult problem within the constraints of limited resources, vague guidance, and perhaps limited imagination.
