In July 2017, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos held a summit on Title IX, the 1972 federal statute that bans discrimination on the basis of sex at universities. Inside the Department of Education building, she met with the National Coalition for Men Carolinas (NCFMC), Families Advocating for Campus Equality (FACE), and Stop Abusive and Violent Environments (SAVE), three organizations that claim there is a crisis of false rape allegations against male college students. Outside, despite the sweltering heat in Washington, D.C., more than a 100 people rallied, hoping to prevent the department from rolling back protections for students who are victims of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. “Dear Betsy,” one sign read. “Help end rape culture, don’t perpetuate it.”
Nearly 3,000 pages of e-mails obtained by the anti-corruption organization Democracy Forward through a Freedom of Information Act request and shared with The Nation reveal that the July 2017 meeting was part of a much deeper collaboration between the DOE and these men’s rights groups. From May to September 2017, the DOE’s Office of Civil Rights partnered with NCFMC, FACE, and SAVE to develop regulations on campus sexual assault. E-mails make clear that staffers from these organizations participated in conference calls, offered legal advice, and met with high-level employees at the Department of Education. The DOE even hired the main funder of SAVE to help draft new regulations and teamed up with FACE to try to produce supportive op-eds.
The views of these groups have never been hidden. In public and in e-mails with DOE employees, members of these organizations have demeaned the credibility of young women, ridiculed sexual assault survivors, and pushed junk science on campus rape.
In September 2017, DeVos announced that she would rescind Obama-era guidance on how educational institutions should handle sexual assault. A year later, the DOE published its new proposed regulations; this week, two federal courts declined to stop them from being implemented, following one lawsuit from 17 states and the District of Columbia and another by New York school boards; and so today they go into effect.
The new rules chip away at protections for sexual assault survivors. Among other changes, universities are no longer obligated to investigate most sexual assaults that occur off-campus, where an estimated 80 percent of college students live, or to complete their inquiry within 60 days. Professors and administrators no longer have to report sexual violence when they’re informed of an incident. The regulations also narrow the type of sexual harassment that universities are required to probe to behavior “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to the [school’s] education program or activity.” At the same time, the DOE effectively raised the evidentiary bar for schools to take action from a “preponderance of evidence” to a “clear and convincing” standard—or from a more than 50 percent likelihood to a more than 75 percent likelihood. Universities would also be found in violation of the regulations only if they responded to sexual harassment in a way that was “deliberately indifferent.” (The DOE did not answer The Nation’s request for comment.)
In May 2020, the ACLU sued the DOE over the new rules, estimating that universities would investigate 32 percent fewer reports of sexual harassment and assault. The sexual assault survivor-advocacy group Know Your IX, who joined the ACLU’s lawsuit against the DOE, denounced the regulations as “an outright attack on students’ civil rights.”
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