The debate around Title IX enforcement on college campuses has intensified recently, in the wake of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ recent announcement that she plans to rescind existing guidance and replace it with regulation at an unspecified date.
According to Ben Trachtenberg, associate professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, current conversations around Title IX enforcement often skip over one key element: the impact of racial bias on disciplinary outcomes at colleges and universities.
In a paper published in the 2018 Nevada Law Journal, Trachtenberg argues that accused students, more commonly referred to as “respondents,” may be impacted by biases around race and ethnicity during the disciplinary process, weighting the system against minority students. The trouble is, there is no way to know whether this is the case since colleges and universities are not required to collect or make public demographic data relating to disciplinary proceedings.
“The Office for Civil Rights would be wise to require higher education institutions to collect demographic data about discipline as K-12 schools are already required to do,” Trachtenberg said.
Through the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), the Education Department already gathers demographic information about students in K-12 schools across the country, including demographic data on students who are given in-school suspension, out of school suspension, and expulsion. The data has helped shape policy initiatives, and provided clear evidence that at some schools children of color are disproportionately likely to be suspended or otherwise penalized. So why not do the same at colleges and universities, Trachtenberg asks?
While greater transparency would shed light on all campus disciplinary proceedings, Trachtenberg argues that it would have a particular impact on cases involving complaints of sexual harassment and assault. Broad definitions of what constitutes sexual harassment and assault leaves room for subjectivity on the part of the administrators overseeing the cases, according to Trachtenberg, opening the door for possible bias, implicit or otherwise.
Title IX was first created in the 1970s in an effort to create parity in high school and college sports for women. Its scope has since expanded to include the potential removal of federal funding from schools if they discriminate on the basis of gender, and to require them to prevent and address sexual harassment and assault on campus.
