Yale fined for Clery Act violations

The Department of Education has fined Yale University a total of $165,000 for various violations of the Clery Act. The fines are the total sum from multiple violations in the early 2000s when the university did not report four separate sexual assaults and did not include the Yale-New Haven Hospital as part of the campus thus omitting from their self-reported crime statistics any events that took place there.
The news of the fines comes at a time when college students across the country are accusing their respective administrators of similar violations. (See our previous posts about Occidental, Swarthmore, Amherst, and Dartmouth.)
The fines are the maximum allotted under the law, but they are not the equivalent of some of the large jury awards we have seen in the past decade from Title IX cases. And so it remains to be seen whether this will deter other institutions from similar misreporting.  
Yale has apparently asked for a reconsideration of the fines. Not because they cannot pay them, I suspect, but rather because there is a certain admission of guilt in doing so. When the university entered into a voluntary resolution agreement last year with OCR over Title IX complaints related to the hostile sexual climate at Yale and the policies and procedures in place to address incidents of sexual violence and harassment, it meant there was no finding of wrongdoing. I assume that Yale wants to keep its official record clean.

OCR's Quadrennial Report, and Ali's Last Day

Yesterday the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights held a conference call to roll out a new report summarizing its enforcement and policymaking efforts since 2009.  Federal law requires the agency to produce a report like this every four years, covering all of its enforcement areas including but not limited to Title IX.  The report does not contain any big news or surprises on the Title IX front, but the conference call did: tomorrow is Assistant Secretary Russlynn Ali's last day on the job.  The Obama administration has not announced a replacement for the OCR chief.

Here's an excerpt from the report, which I thought was interesting.  It's a chart of Title IX complaints, broken down by topic, and showing the total number of times a complaint addressed one of those topics.  Athletics received the most complaints, over 1200, but sexual harassment/sexual violence was a close second with 1137 [that must be a typo in the chart, because racial harassment was discussed in another section]. Beyond those two big and well-known categories, sex discrimination is also alleged in a wide variety of topics from admissions, other forms of differential treatment, employment issues, financial aid, grading, pregnancy, retaliation, and other. 

In addition to the complaints it received, the agency also initiated 37 proactive compliance reviews, 11 of which related to sexual violence and 17 of which related to athletics.

The report is useful as a barometer of what Title IX issues are still relevant and in what proportions.  But other than the information about proactive compliance reviews,  there's not a lot of useful data about enforcement.  For example, of those 1264 athletics claims -- how many did OCR investigate?  How many compliance orders or resolution agreements?  Because we know that hundreds of athletics claims -- the mass complaints filed against school districts in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and California -- were effectively dismissed without investigation, we can guess that the "percent of claims investigated" figure would have been rather low.  I'd have been curious to compare that to similar enforcement data for other types of claims. 

NCAA Reports on Status of Women

Commemorating the Title IX's 40th anniversary year, the NCAA published a report on the status of women in college athletics.  Authored by Amy Wilson, the report focuses on three areas: participation opportunities, resource allocation, and leadership opportunities. Regarding participation, the report provides current data on the exponential rise on women's college and high school opportunities in the last 40 years.  While women now have over 191,000 athletic opportunities at the college level, up from 64,000 30 years ago, women's opportunities amount to 43% of the total, despite the fact that women constitute a 54% majority of college undergraduates overall.  This graph from the report provides a nice visual aid to help refute any suggestion that women's lack of interest in sports is the reason for this gender gap.  Over 3 million women play high school sports, so a pool of potentially interested and qualified recruits would clearly support the addition of new collegiate opportunities for women.

The report also contains participation data broken down by division, and includes data on diversity as well.

In terms of  resource allocation, the report demonstrates that a gender gap persists in this area as well.  Universities in the Football Bowl Subdivision of Division I spend 2.5 times as much on men's sports than women's, and men's sports receive the lion's share of resources in other divisions as well.  In every division, women's share of resources was closer to equitable in schools without football. 

Lastly, in terms of leadership opportunity, the report confirms that the gender gap among college coaches still persists.  The only good news in this area is that at least this gap seems to be holding steady, rather than widening in recent years, according to data cited from Carpenter & Acosta's longitudinal study.
Women comprise 19%  of college athletic directors, up 3% from data collected 15 years ago.  The gap in leadership is even wider for minority women.



In all, the report shows progress but persistent gender inequality in college sports, confirming the pervasive view among Title IX advocates, that the law's 40th anniversary provides an opportunity not only to celebrate, but also to take stock of how much more remains to do.