This administration's Department of Education issued a memo last week stating that the 2020 guidelines are now back in effect. My institution sent an email to that effect recently as I suspect many others did. But the specifics of what the change meant were not provided (not surprising given how opaque the process remains nationwide).
The Biden rules were only recently implemented so perhaps the old rules are not so foreign, but given that this administration called Biden's DOE take on the law "an egregious slight to women and girls" it is worth (re)examining what the DeVos era rules require.
The 2020 rules were a more subtle version of countering ideologies that conservatives saw as part of a DEI agenda, including supposed discrimination against men during the adjudication processes college and universities were using to respond to accusation of sexual assault.
So we are back to:
- the often times traumatizing mandate for live hearings in which the accused can question the accuser
- a narrower definition of sexual assault and harassment that required it be "so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive" that it effectively denies a person equal educational access.
- I insert here my plug for the 2024 book On the Wrong Side: How Universities Protect Perpetrators and Betray Survivors of Sexual Violence by Nicole Bedera, which I am making my way through now. Bedera talks about the book, whose research occurred during the Trump admin part I but before finalization of the DeVos rules, here. (Spoiler: she doesn't think that any administration's rules went far enough.) A main theme is how many victims leave school after encountering barriers during the reporting process.
- a narrower scope for what kind of cases schools can pursue in terms of location of alleged incidents (on campus or at school-sponsored events)
- reduced liability for schools who must show "deliberate indifference" to an accuser's report of sexual or domestic violence; deliberate indifference is difficult to prove
Biden's DOE rules notably expanded protections based on gender identity and are arguably the reason they were legally impeded and eventually overturned, which happened before the inauguration, even though the current DOE seems to be taking the credit.
Now we have an even more difficult reporting process for sexual assault and harassment and fewer protections for all victims of gender-based* assault, discrimination, and harassment.
So time for another reminder: women's issues are trans issues are race issues are poverty issues. This reversion to 2020 rules were certainly part of the effort to appeal to conservative values by vilifying trans people, the larger LGBTQ community and their allies and they will not protect women and girls, an action this version of the administration has no interest in.
* not sex because I don't hear a lot of discourse about how that XY chromosome was dressed or the amount of alcohol the human with less than 5 nanomoles/L of testosterone had to drink
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