Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said the Biden administration’s efforts to roll back her Title IX regulations defy common sense and will have negative consequences for college students and women’s sports.
“This whole draft rule is so far to the Left, and there are so many concerning pieces in it,” DeVos told the Washington Examiner in an interview Monday. “I don’t know how anyone with any sense of fairness and objectivity can look at this and say, ‘I can embrace this and get behind it.'”
DeVos, who led the Department of Education under former President Donald Trump, led a substantial revision of the department’s Title IX regulations during her tenure, which was widely seen as the landmark policy achievement of her time as secretary. Those regulations, enacted in August 2020, strengthened due process requirements for colleges adjudicating sexual harassment and sexual assault complaints under Title IX by requiring investigators to conduct a live hearing and requiring involved parties to undergo cross-examination.
EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ROLLS BACK DEVOS-ERA TITLE IX REGULATION
On Thursday, the Department of Education under President Joe Biden and Secretary Miguel Cardona released a long-awaited proposal revising DeVos’s 2020 rule that eliminates many of the due process protections implemented under DeVos’s leadership, including removing the requirement for a live hearing with cross-examination and allowing schools to investigate and adjudicate accusations of sexual assault and harassment with a single investigator.
The proposed regulation, which is now in a 60-day period of public comment, also expands the definition of sex under Title IX to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
In the interview with the Washington Examiner, DeVos blasted the department’s new proposal, saying it “totally obliterates due process” and that the expanded definition of sex would have substantially broad implications, especially in connection to athletics, even as the department said it would undergo a separate rule-making process for athletics.
“I think it’s important to distinguish [sex] because of the very issue that we seem to be confronting now,” DeVos said, “which is certainly all the downstream implications of expanding the definition of sex and how it specifically relates to women’s sports. They say they’re going to address it later, but I don’t know how you can separate sports from Title IX.”
While the issue of redefining sex has garnered the most attention since the rule was announced last week, the revision of the due process requirements encompasses a significant part of the changes from the 2020 rule, many of which had been adopted to conform with court rulings castigating universities for what critics said amounted to “kangaroo courts” in Title IX sexual harassment cases.
DeVos said that the proposed rule’s provision allowing a single investigator to investigate, adjudicate, and discipline an individual accused of sexual assault was “totally unfair and not respecting due process protections at all.”
The department claimed in its proposal that the single investigator model was in fact more reliable for maintaining a fair process, a fact that DeVos took issue with.
“How could they claim that?” DeVos asked. “It is totally bizarre to say that one individual is going to be the investigator, the judge, and the jury in these situations … it defies common sense.”
DeVos recently released a book about her time as secretary titled Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child.
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She told the Washington Examiner that if the proposed Title IX regulations are finalized, college students should be concerned “about the implications for themselves and for their peers.”
