Tag: Officially

PHOTO: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos incited an uproar early in September when she announced plans to do away with Obama-era guidelines on how campuses should investigate allegations of rape and sexual assault. Now, she’s officially followed through on her promise.

The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights announced Friday that it’s withdrawing two key pieces of Title IX guidance. One is the 2011 Dear Colleagues Letter, a comprehensive directive how schools receiving federal funding should handle sexual violence on campus—everything from evidence-gathering protocol to how quickly cases should be investigated. The other is a 2014 document called Questions and Answers on Title IX and Sexual Violence, which clarified certain elements of the 2011 DCL.

“The 2011 and 2014 guidance documents may have been well-intentioned, but those documents have led to the deprivation of rights for many students—both accused students denied fair process and victims denied an adequate resolution of their complaints,” Candice Jackson, the Department of Education’s Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, wrote in a new Dear Colleagues Letter. “The guidance has not succeeded in providing clarity for educational institutions or in leading institutions to guarantee educational opportunities on the equal basis that Title IX requires. Instead, schools face a confusing and counterproductive set of regulatory mandates, and the objective of regulatory compliance has displaced Title IX’s goal of educational equity.”

In withdrawing the guidelines, Jackson said the Department of Education will “develop an approach to student sexual misconduct that responds to the concerns of stakeholders and that aligns with the purpose of Title IX to achieve fair access to educational benefits.”

We don’t yet know exactly what that new approach will look like, but Jackson said the department will solicit public comment in establishing its new policies—and “will not rely on the withdrawn documents in its enforcement of Title IX.”

The news was met with criticism from the left, some arguing that rescinding those Obama-era guidelines would make it even harder for sexual assault victims to come forward.

“Survivors of sexual assault have the right to feel safe and to be heard,” California Sen. Kamala Harris tweeted. “This decision is a disgrace.”

https://twitter.com/SenKamalaHarris/status/911252290744590336

DeVos made it well known that she was considering changes to the Obama administration’s efforts to curb sexual assault on campus. In July, she held meetings with rape survivors and men’s rights activists who advocated for those accused of sexual misconduct; when she was finished, she hinted that changes would come soon.

“We need to do this right, we need to protect all students and we need to do it quickly,” she said at the time.