Let us join in the chorus of those praising the recent American Association of University Professors (AAUP) statement, “The History, Uses and Abuses of Title IX.” In it, AAUP rightly criticizes the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights (OCR) for the way it has enforced Title IX. Its bureaucrats have neglected appropriate rulemaking procedures and have imposed a coercive bureaucratic regime that requires colleges and universities to ignore evidentiary protections and constitutional rights.
AAUP’s statement echoes concerns ACTA has raised time and again. In 2013, we joined with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education in a letter to college and university trustees around the country, urging them to push back against OCR’s misbegotten Montana “guidance” letter.
We released a statement on Capitol Hill, calling on Congress to defund the department until appropriate rulemaking proceedings took place.
Were a number of college and university boards to band together to sue OCR for its unconstitutional crackdown, they could use the courts to force an end to OCR’s improper coercion of colleges and universities.
Sexual assault is a crime and must be treated as a crime. But we agree with AAUP that the Department of Education has unconscionably conflated “conduct and speech cases” in a way that has grossly expanded the intrusion of this unaccountable bureaucracy at the expense of faculty and student constitutional rights. It’s time that institutions—and their boards—fought back. ACTA is here to help.
On July 12, ACTA sent a letter to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions as they met to interview Ms. Catherine E. Lhamon on her nomination to be Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education. This letter was sent to educate the Committee on the importance of due process […]
The 18th-century British jurist William Blackstone pronounced, “It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” There are few principles of law we hold more sacred than “innocent until proven guilty.” For most of the last decade, however, this doctrine has had negligible impact in matters of campus sexual assault. There […]
WASHINGTON, DC—The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) today praised the U.S. Department of Education’s decision to replace its current guidance on campus sexual assault and submit new guidance to a formal notice-and-comment period. Known as the “Dear Colleague Letter,” the 2011 guidance from the Department of Education outlined how colleges should handle campus […]
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