Any day now, the Department of Education will release its finalized adaptation of Title IX protocols, dictating how colleges handle sexual assault and harassment. Although the rules will likely match most of the stipulations released by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos last year, the final code is rumored to nix her earlier proposal to remove all off-campus allegations of sexual assault or harassment from the jurisdiction of Title IX inquiries.
Asked about the controversial stipulation by the Washington Examiner in an hour-long editorial meeting, DeVos had this to say:
Critics of DeVos’s removal of off-campus allegations from Title IX’s jurisdiction argued that that it would preclude assaults in fraternity houses or during off-campus activities and conferences from federally mandated adjudication. If DeVos’s answer to our inquiry was any indication, she’s more interested in creating hard guardrails on Title IX’s reach than in finding the most literal interpretation of Title IX.
Only time will tell, but those rumors that she’ll reverse the off-campus stipulation didn’t seem to match DeVos’s carefully worded perspective.
