- Claw back money spent on unhelpful college tuition after bankruptcy? Not if Connecticut has anything to say about it [The American Interest]
- Incoming civil rights/Title IX enforcement officials tell university lawyers they plan to take less adversarial stance toward colleges than did previous administration [Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed]
- “Maryland becomes first state to outlaw scholarship displacement by public colleges” [Tim Prudente, Baltimore Sun] Note that practice undercuts gratitude-inducing efficacy of state’s custom of “legislative scholarships” [sample explanation]
- Clinton, Obama education bureaucracy couched Title IX dictates as “guidance,” which should make them easier to revisit [Hans Bader, CEI]
- California, other states’ embargo on state-paid travel to “bad” conservative states is putting stress on academic conferences [Nick Roll/Inside Higher Ed, Teresa Watanabe and Rosanna Xia, L.A. Times]
- The ABA is stifling innovation in legal education [Allen
Mendenhall, Law and Liberty]
Posts Tagged ‘Title IX’
Campus climate roundup
- This seems an important point: requiring students to engage in social justice work impinges on their moral independence [Julie Lawton, DePaul Law]
- 7 minutes of madness: astounding Michael Moynihan video on the Evergreen State blowup [Vice News, language]
- Classics in ruins [Sandra Kotta/Quillette, parts one, two]
- “Princeton Appears To Penalize Minority Candidates for Not Obsessing About Their Race” [Coyote]
- Claim: college violated Title IX by not doing more to stop anonymous off-campus social media posts [T. Rees Shapiro, Washington Post on suit against University of Mary Washington]
- Historical figure almost wholly forgotten except as name on building. Worth exhuming just to manifest our disdain? [Charles Reichmann, San Francisco Chronicle on Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley] More: Online shaming mobs from both sides of the political spectrum now going after provocative academics [Heterodox Academy]
Grad student to sue over portrayal in Laura Kipnis book
Laura Kipnis, who wrote a widely read article on the problems with the Title IX accusation process on campus and then herself had to fend off a Title IX complaint based on having written the article, is now being sued by the same Northwestern University graduate student who pursued the earlier Title IX complaints. The woman says she was portrayed under a pseudonym in Kipnis’s new book Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes To Campus and was unfairly characterized as, among other things, “litigious.” [Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, Robby Soave, earlier on Kipnis]
Higher education roundup
- U.S. Department of Education and Title IX: “The Office for Civil Rights Is Still Out of Control” [KC Johnson]
- Mobility penalty: “The residency requirement in Cuomo’s free tuition plan makes a bad idea worse” [Beth Akers]
- Loyalty oaths? Many colleges now require diversity statements for hiring and promotion [George Leef] Public college expels nursing student for breach of professional ethics code that includes ideological commitments, Supreme Court should review [Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald/Cato, Eugene Volokh on petition for certiorari in Keefe v. Adams]
- Maryland lawmakers move to bar colleges from asking applicants about criminal records [WYPR; Michael Dresser, Baltimore Sun]
- “Colleges and the First Amendment” [video, Federalist Society panel with Michael McConnell, Philip Hamburger, et al.] Eugene Volokh presentation on free speech on campus Reason video, etc.
- “Torch the miscreant, resanctify the community.” Laura Kipnis attends a Title IX trial [Chronicle of Higher Education, (from her forthcoming book); more at Reason]
Higher education roundup
- “If this becomes the new normal… the intellectual thugs will take over many campuses….A minority of faculty are cowing a majority in the same way that a minority of students are cowing the majority.” Why Charles Murray is pessimistic following the Middlebury attack [AEI] Frank Bruni on the Middlebury events and “the dangerous safety of college” [New York Times]
- “Faculty and students need to be free to express ideas and viewpoints rather than be penalized for their politics.” [letter from group of Wellesley alumnae]
- Finally! Federal government in January opened door for universities to relax some of their IRB (institutional review board) scrutiny of human-subjects research in low-risk areas not involving medical intervention [Richard Shweder and Richard Nisbett, Chronicle of Higher Education, related Institutional Review Blog] Update: some annotations/corrections from Michelle Meyer;
- “Colorado student expelled for raping his girlfriend, even though both he and his girlfriend both deny the charge.” [Robby Soave/Reason on CSU-Pueblo case, via (and described by) Radley Balko] “End federal micromanagement of college discipline under Title IX” [Hans Bader/CEI, and related] “Maybe I’m drunk, but this doesn’t seem fair” [The Safest Space on “both were drunk, he got charged” poster]
- What, no taxpayer dollars to pursue favored legal causes? North Carolina proposal would bar public universities from representing lawsuit clients [Caron/TaxProf]
- I hadn’t followed the “New Civics” movement. It sounds pretty bad [George Leef, Martin Center]
Campus climate roundup
- Hundreds of colleges now have bias response teams, with many deeply involved in regulating speech [Adam Steinbaugh, FIRE survey]
- Trump’s tweet made old idea new: in 1991, Rep. Henry Hyde filed unsuccessful bill to cut off federal funding of colleges that punished students for speech otherwise protected by First Amendment [The American Interest, earlier] A new cadre of federally mandated administrators, modeled on Title IX coordinators and backed by the threat of funding cutoffs, to ride herd within universities? Uh-oh [Michael Rappaport, ambivalent]
- Arizona lawmakers quickly kill bill to cut state support from classes and activities that “promote division, resentment or social justice toward a race, gender, religion, political affiliation, social class or other class,” which would have extended earlier curb on Mexican and other ethnic studies [Tucson Star, Arizona Republic, Christian Science Monitor; background Melinda Anderson, Atlantic]
- 47 Boston College faculty members ask “zero-tolerance” policy on hate speech. That’s different from the speech that Arizona was looking at that “promote[s] division, resentment” along ethnic lines, right? [Washington Times]
- At the University of Minnesota, you might lose a student-advisor job for not demonstrating “a commitment to social justice growth and promotion to residents.” [David Blondin, Minnesota Republic/Campus Reform]
- View that speech is violence, and thus properly countered by violence in response, is popular at UC Berkeley student paper [screencap by Ashley Rae on Twitter] More: The new religious establishment: Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has $20 million a year, 150 staff [Heather Mac Donald]
Eugene Volokh vs. Deborah Rhode on hostile environment and ABA 8.4(g)
At last month’s Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention, Eugene Volokh debated Deborah Rhode on whether hostile environment law on and off campus often violates the First Amendment. The discussion also got onto Model Rule 8.4 (g), adopted by the American Bar Association a few months ago, which makes it “professional misconduct” for an attorney to engage in “conduct,” including verbal “conduct,” that “the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.” Can bar disciplinary committees be trusted not to apply this language to politically incorrect expression by lawyers, including in pedagogical settings such as law school and continuing legal education (CLE)? [Josh Blackman, Francis Pileggi]
Related: ABA president Linda Klein says hate speech “cannot be tolerated.” [Scott Greenfield] And a Eugene Volokh podcast for the Federalist Society on 8.4.
Higher education roundup
- Colleagues demand Oregon law prof resign over Hallowe’en costume [Paul Caron/TaxProf; Eugene Volokh (“We have reached a bad and dangerous place in American life, and in American university life in particular.”)] Title IX and expression: “What the feds have done to colleges and schools” [Hans Bader, Minding the Campus]
- Institutional review boards (IRBs) “as a rule are incredibly difficult to study…. There is no public record of their decision or deliberations, they don’t, as a rule, invite scrutiny or allow themselves to be observed.” [Dr. Steven Joffe quoted by Tyler Cowen]
- “An emphasis on intersectionality”: mandatory diversity course for first-years at AU now has course description [earlier] “U-M’s New ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ Will Collect $385,000 per Year” [Derek Draplin, Michigan Capitol Confidential]
- “Plaintiffs’ Bar Steps Up Profitable False Claims Act Assault on Higher Education” [U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform]
- Notwithstanding initial wave of critical coverage, Will Creeley says PEN report on campus speech is actually pretty good [FIRE] “Student group at Cal State Northridge boasts of ‘shutting down’ speech by award-winning scholar” [Volokh; Armenian students vs. Ataturk lecture]
- On question whether universities must treat student athletes as employees, NLRB “may be battling for field position” with future ruling in mind [Brennan Bolt, McGuire Woods]
A federal school bathroom policy? Not so fast
The Obama administration has ambitiously asserted, as an application of Title IX, that schools nationwide must make available to transgender students the general bathroom facilities that correspond to their gender identity. To resolve a case now up for Supreme Court review, it is not necessary to reach the merits of this policy; the promulgation of the new policy by guidance letter, without advance notice, chance for public comment and other protections for regulated parties, is enough of a defect to strike it down. [Ilya Shapiro and David McDonald on Cato Institute amicus brief, with law professors Jonathan Adler, Richard Epstein, and Michael McConnell, supporting certiorari review in Gloucester County School Board v. G.G.]
[The Education Department] seeks to change federal law not through notice-and-comment rulemaking as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, but through an informal, unpublished letter written by a low-level bureaucrat. …We call on the Court to take this opportunity to overrule Auer and declare that the judiciary will no longer blindly accept self-serving agency interpretations, but make their own independent determinations based on a searching and reasoned reading of the regulations at issue. Should the Court choose not to overrule Auer, we suggest that—at minimum—it hold that only agency interpretations that have received the public scrutiny of notice-and-comment rulemaking merit judicial deference.
More on Auer deference here, etc.
Higher education and Title IX roundup
- “Free Speech on Campus: A Challenge of Our Times,” recent speech by University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone;
- University of Virginia puts professor on leave of absence after comments critical of Black Lives Matter [Hans Bader] “Yes, Brooklyn College really has a Director of Diversity Investigations.” One prof’s experience [David Seidemann/Minding the Campus]
- “Lawyer: Why the lower standard of evidence in college sexual-assault cases is dangerous” [Robert Shibley] It’s rare for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights to stick up in favor of due process rights for accused students, but that just happened in Wesley College case [Jake New/Inside Higher Ed, Tyler Kingkade/BuzzFeed, ED press release]
- “Northern Michigan University had — and perhaps still has — a policy subjecting students to discipline if they share suicidal thoughts with their peers.” So how bad an idea is that? [Ken White, Popehat]
- “Historically Black Colleges and Universities struggle with Title IX compliance” [American Sports Council on reporting by David Squires/The Undefeated]
- “University Of Michigan Gets Lost In The Tall SJW Weeds” [Amy Alkon] Georgetown offers legacy status to applicants descended from university-owned slaves; showy gesture, but anything more? [Scott Greenfield] “American University Student Government Launches Campaign for Mandatory Trigger Warnings” [Robby Soave]