At Michigan State University and the University of Southern California, many, many bureaucrats deserve to rot in prison for a very long time.
Despite the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter, widely considered to have enacted standards less favorable to those accused of sexual assault, harassment, or misconduct under Title IX, MSU and USC let two monsters off the hook. The moral of these two tragedies: Title IX is only as effective as the least competent school administrators.
MSU’s since-fired President Lou Anna Simon faces up to four years in prison for charges related to her protection of serial predator and con artist, Dr. Larry Nassar. Prosecutors allege that Simon lied to law enforcement when she told them that she had no knowledge of the sexual abuse allegations against Larry Nassar until 2016. As it turns out, Simon sat down with the head of MSU’s Title IX office in 2014 specifically to discuss the Nassar situation.
You know how that story ends.
Simon and her school’s Title IX office imposed no punishment on Nassar in spite of the multiple credible accusers who came forward against him. Now, MSU’s Title IX office is under federal investigation for what Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls MSU’s “systemic issues” in “handling sex-based incidents.”
They’re not the only ones. USC’s sole campus gynecologist, George Tyndall, allegedly molested female students for over three decades. Dozens of his victims filed complaints with the health center over the years, but it seems as though it wasn’t until 2013 that the health center turned over complaints to the university’s Office of Equity and Diversity, which houses Title IX.
The Los Angeles Times, which broke the story, reported that over the course of the Title IX investigation, “Tyndall … and multiple chaperones who complained said they were never informed of the probe or questioned by the investigator.” Ultimately, this supposed investigation found Tyndall innocent. In 2017, as USC realized that the story was leaking, Vice President of Student Affairs Ainsley Carry brokered a hush money payout to Tyndall. Carry and USC did not even report Tyndall to the medical board, such that if it had been left to them, he could have gone on to abuse more patients.
“There was no there there,” said USC’s Title IX coordinator, Gretchen Dahlinger Means, who dismissed the complaints in Tyndall’s Title IX case. “We did not have a victim to talk about what had occured.”
Since the initial story’s publication, at least 250 victims and counting have come forward with a lawsuit against USC. Experts estimate that Tyndall could have assaulted up to 17,000 women over the 30 years during which USC knew of student abuse allegations.
Title IX will never administer justice. Rapists and abusers deserve to prison, not expulsion. But Title IX is explicitly designed to ensure that students at schools that receive federal funding, and thus institutions that taxpayers have a stake in, ensure women equal, unfettered access to their education.
It’s important to refine and reform Title IX to ensure that accused parties receive due process and that victims receive university support. But the stories of evil and incompetent administrators at USC and MSU, complicit in abuse and violence against women, should serve as a timely reminder that specific personnel may matter more than federal policy.
