Betsy DeVos’s Education Department was busy this time last year. Her team had to craft a message, and a temporary fix, for a part of the Obama legacy they considered in dire need of undoing: The 2011 Title IX guidance documents that pressured colleges and universities to adjudicate sexual misconduct claims internally and, as was increasingly apparent in the years that followed, too often inefficiently and unfairly.
Last July, DeVos held an emotional summit at the department headquarters. Students accused of sexual assault—falsely, they maintain—presented a case for reform or rescission of the existing federal guidance. Sexual assault survivors, meanwhile, offered perspectives on the guidance’s flaws as well: Lack of transparency, failure to communicate accusations, subjective training matrixes all were described
Last SeptemberDeVos rescinded the “Dear Colleague” letter that put this process in place on college campuses. To replace it, her team gave administrators the option to adjust their procedures: Schools could use a slightly tougher standard of proof and a longer decision deadline if they chose. DeVos also promised a proper notice-and-comment process before issuing any binding guidance down the road.
Almost a year later, the notice-and-comment process she promised has yet to begin. The vast majority of campuses have declined to improve their processes. And they say they don’t plan to.
More than three-fourths of the college officials recently surveyed by the consultancy firm APCO Worldwide said they had no intention to alter their internal policies on sexual misconduct. Of the 100 general counsels and communications officials who responded 64 said that they would ignore DeVos’s request for input as to what sort of binding policy should replace the rescinded guidance. Only 8 percent said they viewed her proposed changes positively.
In response to the 2011 guidance,, colleges and universities set up Title IX tribunals, trained and hired investigators, and created internal procedures to satisfy demands DeVos has lately relaxed. But these measures are still fixed in place—thanks in part to the public relations panic that gripped administrators when found themselves on a widely published list of colleges with unresolved sexual misconduct cases pending.
Harlan Teller, the president of APCO, told me his intention in commissioning the study was in part to stir up a timely conversation. DeVos is a controversial figure, largely because of who appointed her. Trump’s history with the opposite sex, meanwhile, was and is a cornerstone of a new feminism. At this point, though, “I don’t think it’s politics. I think it’s more pragmatic than that,” Teller said, “My experience is they feel they’ve made a good faith effort to address the issue. They feel they’ve done a lot.” For most, turning back the clock now would be out of the question.
Prominent Title IX consultants and attorneys have long predicted the resistance to change that the survey reveals, however. “That’s what I’ve been saying all along,” said Title IX attorney Andrew Miltenberg, who defended the accused Columbia student in activist Emma Sulkowicz’s now infamous case, when I asked about the survey. (It’s true: he has.) “I think this is an issue that we’re not going to be able to legislate away.”
“Part of it is also a political counter statement to the Trump administration,” Miltenberg added, of school’s reluctance to make changes. “We’re also seeing universities drawing a battle line: The administration is trying to roll back protections for women, and we’re not going to let them do that.”
The path toward greater transparency won’t be political or legislative, he said: A mandatory reform enforced by administrative diktat would lead to a revolt. Hoping for integral improvements, school by school, are the optimist’s only option. And he said he’s seen some “touch up their policies and procedures in certain ways that I applaud”: NYU, Yale, Boston College, to name a few, all have imposed minor corrections since he first became acquainted with the innerworkings of their Title IX procedures.
Whatever comes from DeVos’s Education Department after the eventual notice-and-comment period will probably have some sort of an impact, “On some institutions,” he said. “But do I think the day after the new [Dear Colleague Letter] is issued, things will change? I do not.” If they were going to, they would have already—and at more than 23 percent of American colleges.
