Free Republic

... Title IX has now become a “juggernaut” in the words of NYU law professor Richard Epstein. He explains in this Hoover Institution article that extremely zealous bureaucrats have abused the law (specifically, the Administrative Procedure Act) to impose their own ideas of what the language “be subjected to discrimination” means. They have managed to turn it into a justification for federal intervention into every aspect of college life that somehow involves sex. Epstein highlights the amazing case of Colorado State – Pueblo student Grant Neal, who was suspended by the school after a consensual sexual relationship. The woman who...

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A Virginia high school discriminated against a transgender teen by forbidding him from using the boys' restroom, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday in a case that could have implications for a North Carolina law that critics say discriminates against LGBT people. The case of Gavin Grimm has been especially closely watched since North Carolina enacted a law last month that bans transgender people from using public restrooms that correspond to their gender identity. That law also bans cities from passing anti-discrimination ordinances, a response to an ordinance recently passed in Charlotte. In the Virginia case,...

Earlier this season, Prairie View A&M women's basketball coach Dawn Brown suspended two players on her team because they were dating. This week, the university announced Brown would not return next season. Brown told USA Today Sports the university told her she was fired because she violated Title IX by discriminating against the players, even though Brown says the school's own Title IX administrator approved the players' suspension.

On Friday, Paul Nungesser, the alleged rapist of “Mattress Girl” Emma Sulkowicz, had his discrimination lawsuit against Columbia University dismissed. In 2014, Emma Sulkowicz launched her art-protest piece “Carry That Weight,” in which she carried her mattress with her everywhere (including to commencement), as a condemnation of Columbia's handling of her rape complaint. Though the University cleared him of wrongdoing and allowed him to continue with school, Nungesser's name was eventually made public. Last year, he filed a discrimination suit against the school under Title IX (the statute under which victims of sexual assault often bring their claims). In the...

Melissa Click, an assistant mass media communications professor at the University of Missouri, is currently suspended for assaulting a student journalist during a protest and calling for "muscle" to push the journalist out of the way. But, this was not the first incident involving the professor and the profession of free speech. Let's take a look at what has happened the past four months regarding Professor Click: • On November 9, 2015, Click called for "muscle" at a protest on the college campus, which was caught on video and went viral. • She resigned from a courtesy position in the...

A lawsuit filed by a group of women alleges that the University of Tennessee has violated Title IX regulations and created a "hostile sexual environment" through a policy of indifference toward assaults by student-athletes. The federal suit filed Tuesday in Nashville states Tennessee's policies made students more vulnerable to sexual assault and says that the school had a "clearly unreasonable response" after incidents that caused the women making complaints to endure additional harassment. The suit also states the university interfered with the disciplinary process to favor male athletes. [...] The suit was filed by David Randolph Smith, a lawyer representing...

Conservatives have long accused academics of shredding the Constitution, figuratively speaking, but a Project Veritas sting operation recently caught them doing it literally. Undercover video released last week showed administrators at Yale, Cornell, Syracuse, Vassar and Oberlin agreeing to rip up copies of the Constitution handed out off campus after an investigator posing as a student described the document as “triggering” and “oppressive.” “Well, I think that the Constitution means things to different people; like you said it is a flawed document and the people who wrote it are certainly flawed individuals in my mind,” Cornell lead Title IX investigator...

We are still, for the most part, a nation of laws, except on college campuses. At the Heritage Foundation recently, Samantha Harris, director of policy research at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), said that “students have complained about the lack of due process” at colleges. “In the last five years, thanks to unprecedented intrusion by the federal government…due process has gotten a lot worse,” she said. Too often, accused students are left “without a hearing or [cannot] confront their accuser” in court, Harris averred. By her estimate, “more than 60 students have filed lawsuits” of unfair treatment...

When federal politicians passed the Higher Education Act, they thought they were only going to help good students who couldn’t otherwise afford college to attend. They did not think about possible unintended consequences — like making college far more expensive, undermining academic standards, or giving federal bureaucrats leverage to dictate to colleges and universities. But all of that has happened. I’m going to focus on that last consequence—the way federal intervention in higher education has empowered bureaucrats to whittle away at free speech on (and even off) campus. A strange case involving a student at the University of Kansas illustrates...

It doesn't seem to matter what a college does when responding to a sexual assault accusation — they are always wrong. That's according to the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights, which investigates colleges and universities for alleged Title IX violations. In a recent ruling against Michigan State University, OCR determined the school had violated Title IX because it took too long — four days — to remove accused students from their dorms. The fact that the students weren't immediately evicted from campus, even though an investigation hadn't even started, was also evidence of a violation. OCR looked at...

<snip> Judge Norman K. Moon denied W&L's motion to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing John Doe — as he is referred to in the claim — to continue to seek damages resulting from his expulsion from the university. John believes he was wrongly accused of sexual misconduct, and Moon appears to agree. On Feb. 8, 2014, John and his eventual accuser, Jane Doe, met at an off-campus party. The two danced, talked and kissed. The two eventually went back to John's residence and talked for awhile. Jane then walked over to John and allegedly told him, "I usually don't have sex...

Pay equality activists are at it again. This time they’re using the success of the U.S. women’s soccer team in the World Cup final to push their agenda. According to Politico, what we really need to be talking about is the players’ paychecks. “Pay for professional women’s soccer players is at best paltry and at worst outright shameful compared to those of their male counterparts. (The U.S. men’s team is currently ranked 27, compared with the world-champion women),” Mary Pilon writes. “Yet the total payout for the Women’s World Cup this year will be $15 million, compared with the total...

RALEIGH The UNC-Chapel Hill wrestling coach who has been a critic of how universities handle sexual assault allegations that do not go through the courts is out of a job. After 12 seasons as head coach of the UNC wrestling program, C.D. Mock was “relieved of his duties” by UNC athletics director Bubba Cunningham. “I made the decision that a coaching change was in the best interest of our wrestling program moving forward,” Cunningham said in a prepared statement. “I believe a new head coach will re-energize the program and return it to the level of success I expect from...

CIRCULAR TYRANNY Can someone be penalized under a law merely for publicly criticizing it? Northwestern University adjudicated a sexual harassment case against Professor Laura Kipnis after activists filed two complaints over a Kipnis column in the Chronicle Review that criticized activists for exploiting Title IX to create “sexual paranoia” on campuses. They decided that criticism doesn’t constitute a Title IX violation … for now: In the Review essay, published in February, Ms. Kipnis decried a prevailing “sexual paranoia” on college campuses. She alluded to Peter Ludlow, a professor of philosophy at Northwestern who has been accused of sexual misconduct by...

You’d best get out your hip waders, folks – we’re about to wade through a steaming pile of government balderdash. The controversy surrounds a storage shed built by the baseball booster club at Arbor View High School in Las Vegas. The youngsters needed a place to store their bats and balls and bases. The boosters had wanted to build a clubhouse for the teenage ball players, but after months of delay they came up with an alternative plan. One of the parents knew the owner of a company that made precast one-story buildings. The company offered to donate the manpower...

VINTON – In between speaking to students and signing books for whoever wanted one, Olympic gold medalist and Iowa wrestling legend Dan Gable was gracious enough to sit down with me and answer a few of my questions. To me, Dan Gable is not only a sports and human inspiration, but he’s also the subject of one of my all-time favorite pieces of journalism.  I used this interview opportunity to ask him a couple of questions that have been on my mind for two years. This is what transpired:Blake Baxter: What exactly motivated you to write the book (A Wrestling Life:...

One of the student survivors I worked with, Jenna*, was gang-raped by five fraternity men early in her freshman year. Despite the severity of the assault and injuries she sustained, Jenna still experienced a feeling of personal responsibility. Looking for affirmation, she sought out peers and told her story. Sadly, each and every one of the friends she reached out to responded with varying denials of her experience; these responses worsened her feelings of self-blame – that she must be confused because that fraternity “is full of great guys”; that she must have made them think she was “down for...

The young woman who introduced Jackie Coakley to journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely used Jackie’s story to push a federal law eroding due process for men on college campuses. Emily Renda, a 2011 sociology major who wrote on Title IX and the campus rape myth for her college thesis, testified before a U.S. senate panel earlier this year. Here’s what she said in June.

Due process advocates have been up in arms over the past few months as California passed the first statewide “affirmative consent” law in the nation. According to the freshly signed SB 967, all college campuses accepting financial aid in the Golden State must enforce a high standard of establishing sexual consent in student disciplinary hearings, requiring both parties in question to vocalize their approval before engaging in sexual acts.While an array of concerns have been raised about the legal ramifications of this law, one important question has been left out of the discussion almost entirely — why are rape cases...

Justine Siegal was a pioneer long before she pitched batting practice to six major league teams in spring training this year. Two years ago she became the first woman to coach first base for a men's professional team, the Brockton (Mass.) Rox in the independent Canadian American Association. And she spent three seasons as an assistant baseball coach at Springfield (Mass.) College until resigning last year to pursue a doctorate.