Comment Deadline Is Today

Today is the last day to comment on the OCR's proposed Title IX regulations. I submitted my comment just now, and I was the 96,841st person to do so. Wow!

If you were waiting for the last minute like I was, here is the link to the docket, which includes the proposed regulations, the comments received, and the form for submitting your own. 
 
If you are curious about my comment, here it is:

As a law professor, I teach, research, and write about Title IX. In that capacity I have had the opportunity to sign on to some of the comments that are already submitted to this record, but I write separately to comment specifically on the proposed revision to 106.12(b), which provides an exemption for religious institutions. The proposed regulation not only permits educational institutions to decide for themselves whether they must comply with Title IX, but to do so in obscurity. 

I acknowledge that religious institutions have First Amendment rights not to be compelled by the government into compromising their religious tenets. This is why Title VII, for example, exempts religious institutions from the prohibition on religious discrimination, and why courts have interpreted workplace discrimination statutes to contain an exception for religious institutions when it comes to the employment of those they consider ministers. 

But in contrast to laws that impose mandatory requirements on employers—laws like Title VII, and the ACA—Title IX doesn’t compel institutions of any kind, religious or otherwise, to do anything. As Spending Clause legislation, Title IX proposes a voluntarily exchange of federal funding for an educational institution’s promise not to discriminate. Thus its intrusion on religious freedom is minimal, as religious institutions are as free in a world with Title IX as they would be in a world without it, to do whatever they want as a matter of faith. It’s only when they agree to accept the financial support of the government that they undertake an obligation not to discriminate on the basis of sex. 

With this in mind, Title IX’s exemption for religious institutions is already more protective of religious freedom than the Constitution requires. It generously permits religious institutions to accept federal funding even without fully complying with its nondiscrimination mandate. To receive this special treatment, the existing regulation simply requires that these institutions register their exemption in advance. 

The proposed regulation extends this special treatment for religious institutions to the detriment of third-parties, prospective students and employees. At least the current approach allows students and employees to use public religious exemption records to determine prior to matriculating or accepting employment to determine whether their institution has opted out of Title IX. In fact, given that Title IX permits the government to provide financial support to religious institutions whose practices would otherwise violate the law, the only way for prospective students and employees of such institutions to protect themselves from discrimination is to arm themselves with information and use it to make decisions about where to enroll or accept employment. The proposed regulation would eliminate even this modicum of protection that such transparency allows. 

On the other hand, from the standpoint of a religious institution, the burden of complying with the existing religious-exemption regulation is minimal. If an aspect of Title IX truly conflicts with an institution’s religious tenet, it is not difficult for the institution to articulate this conflict in advance. The existing religious-exemption regulation does not require institutions to defend their religious tenets and it protects institutional autonomy to define the nature of the conflict between those tenets and Title IX. Nor does it require religious institutions to advertise or otherwise publicize the scope of their Title IX exemption. Requiring them to put it on the public record in advance is the very least the law can do to protect the rights of students and employees in the face of special treatment that allows religious institutions to discriminate with federal funds. The current religious-exemption regulation should not be modified in the manner OCR has proposed.      

Gender Disparity in Coaches' Chartered Flights at University of Iowa and Iowa State

Some good investigative reporting in Iowa led to this recent article about the gender imbalance in athletic department travel at University of Iowa and Iowa State. Both institutions benefit from wealthy donors who offer up their private planes for coaches to take on recruiting visits, to meetings, and for other work travel.  Yet these donations overwhelmingly favor the coaches of men's teams -- of UI's 54 donated charter flights in the last year, only 1 was to the coach of a woman's team. And it's not like the institutions use other funds to close this gap, paying for (non-donated) charter flights for men's teams coaches more often than charter flights for their coaches of women's team's.

I talked to the reporter for this story and shared some thoughts about the Title IX concerns raised by this disparity. I explained that the fact that the flights are donated does not absolve the university of the gender disparity that results from the donations. Because they benefit a university program, the donated flights are considered by law to be donations to the university. Though the donations themselves might be earmarked for a certain team or coach, the university is still responsible for the equal treatment of its men's and women's programs. If it uses donated money (or, as in this case, donated flights) to benefit only teams of one sex, it has to find other money to balance to provide the equivalent benefit to teams of the other sex.

There are two aspects of Title IX that may be implicated by this imbalance. First, one of the aspects of Title IX's requirement for equal treatment of men's and women's teams is the quality of the coaching they receive. A coach who takes charter flights does not have to spend time driving between Iowa City and the airports in either Cedar Rapids or Moline, factoring in extra time for the security line, waiting out layovers, enduring delays or any of the other time consuming aspects of commercial travel. This leaves the coach with more time and energy for coaching duties: he is more likely to make it back for practice, he can fit in more recruiting stops into a season, he can partake of more professional development opportunities. In short, that team gets more of their coach and thus, a higher-quality coach. A university that eases the path for men's coaches, but leaves up those obstacles for women's coaches, is treating its male athletes better than its female ones.

Second, the disparity is sex discrimination in the terms and conditions of coaches' employment. Because only men coach men's teams, men disproportionately benefit from the perk of taking charter flights. The challenges of commercial travel can create personal inconveniences as well as professional ones, and male coaches alone are spared from that grief. As a result, they may have an easier time making time for family or a personal life. Maybe, if women's coaches were paid more in base salary than men's coaches, there would be an argument that this disparity in chartered travel does not amount employment discrimination, but of course we know that is not case.

As the article notes, University of Iowa is currently under an OCR investigation into the athletic department's compliance with Title IX. Recruiting appears to be an area the agency is looking into, but no findings have yet been made.

FSU does not care

It took me some time to come up with the (somewhat simple) title for this post. I tried to distill what was so furiously frustrating about the fact the Florida State University has hired Kendal Briles as the football team's offensive coordinator.

First, Kendal Briles was an assistant coach at Baylor during the time of the sexual assault crisis/scandal/epidemic. It was his father, Art Briles, who has been held most responsible (at least within the program) for the cover ups and culture; but son, Kendal, also had a role as one of the team's primary recruiters. One story that has emerged from the collection of evidence that has been part of the many, many lawsuits Baylor is still faced with, involves K Briles asking a recruit if he likes white women and noting their widespread availability at BU and their desire for football players.

This is culture shaping. In a very racist and misogynist and violent moment, Briles tells this prospective player that he can access whomever he likes at Baylor. He is offering up the female undergraduates of Baylor to players. This makes me recall women's basketball coach Kim Mulkey's ill-advised and barely apologized for comments to the crowd about how it is safe to send their daughters to Baylor. I don't know if Baylor is any less safe than other campuses. I do not know how to measure this--and I don't especially care about comparisons at this moment. Briles was part of making that campus more dangerous.

Now he has a job at another school which has denied culpability in the culture of sexual violence. And so...two, Florida Sate University thinks it has moved past the Winston era. They have a new head coach (completely unrelated to the way the program and school protected the former Heisman-winning quarterback who continues to make news for engaging in harassment and assault). Admittedly, they probably have moved past that; perhaps they were never really mired in it at all. The media supported the school and the program (watch the segment in the Hunting Ground about Winston and listen to ESPN's Stephen A. Smith sarcastically mock then-anonymous victim Erica Kinsman's motives and unconditionally support, along with colleague Skip Bayless, Winston). It was, after all, only one victim (not true it turns out), and one perpetrator--who left to go pro thus making him the NFL's problem. And (deep cynicism alert), everyone knows how the NFL deals with domestic and sexual assault and violence.

It does not matter to the administration, to the fans, to the program, that FSU has hired a coach who helped perpetuate the climate of sexual violence at his former institution. And that is a problem--a dangerous one. Unchecked football cultures--like the ones that exist at Baylor and FSU--make campuses unsafe places.

Dr. Bernice Sandler, 1928-2019

Dr. Bernice Sandler passed away this week at the age of 90. She went by Bunny, but was even more well-known as the Godmother of Title IX.

Her obituary in the Washington Post described how she came to make advocacy for gender equality in education her life's work:

In 1969, her newly earned doctorate in hand, Bernice Sandler was hoping to land one of seven open teaching positions in her department at the University of Maryland. When she learned she had been considered for none of them, she asked a male colleague about the oversight. “Let’s face it,” was his reply. “You come on too strong for a woman.”

When she applied for another academic position, the hiring researcher remarked that he didn’t hire women because they too often stayed home with sick children. Later, an employment agency reviewed her résumé and dismissed her as “just a housewife who went back to school.”

Dr. Sandler had run head first into a problem that had only recently been given a name: sex discrimination. Knowing she was not alone, she embarked on a campaign that would change the culture on college campuses — and eventually the law with the passage in 1972 of Title IX, the landmark legislation that banned sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions.

Sandler's efforts did not end with Title IX's passage. She continued to research and challenge sexist practices in higher education, including sexual harassment and the "chilly" campus climate. She was also a strong supporter of Title IX's application to athletics. 

RIP Dr. Sandler.