Education Department Issues New Regulations Protecting Due Process on Campus

Education Department Issues New Regulations Protecting Due Process on Campus

The Department of Education has issued new guidelines on Title IX which are designed to end disastrous practices like kangaroo courts on campus.

In recent years, people have watched in horror as the lives of many young people have been ruined by nothing more than an accusation.

This is big. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports:

BREAKING: Education Dept. issues new Title IX regs with crucial campus due process protections, adopts Supreme Court sexual harassment definition

Advocates for free speech and due process on campus won one of their biggest-ever victories today with the finalization of long-awaited new Department of Education Title IX regulations.

The regulations guarantee critical due process protections that Americans recognize as essential to securing justice, but that have for too long been denied to students accused of sexual misconduct on college campuses. The regulations also include important protections for student free speech rights.

“For nearly a decade, FIRE led the charge to introduce fairness to campus proceedings, first nearly alone, then with a growing number of allies,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “Today, we won an important victory. But our work is not over. We will continue to fight to ensure that students are afforded the rights now guaranteed to them when they return to campus this fall.”

Among the procedural protections guaranteed by the new regulations are:

• An express presumption of innocence;
• live hearings with cross-examination conducted by an advisor of choice, who may be an attorney;
• sufficient time and information — including access to evidence — to prepare for interviews and a hearing;
• impartial investigators and decision-makers;
• a requirement that all relevant evidence receive an objective evaluation.

As Vice President, Joe Biden was instrumental in advancing the Title IX policies of the Obama administration. Yet, even though he now stands accused of sexual assault, and is being defended by some Democrats, he is denouncing the policy changes being introduced.

Biden writes at Medium:

Statement by Vice President Joe Biden on the Trump Administration Rule to Undermine Title IX and Campus Safety

Survivors deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, and when they step forward they should be heard, not silenced. Today, Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump published a rule that flies in the face of that belief and guarantees that college campuses will be less safe for our nation’s young people.

Simply put: this new rule gives colleges a green light to ignore sexual violence and strip survivors of their rights. It lets colleges off the hook for protecting students, by permitting them to choose to investigate only more extreme acts of violence and harassment and requiring them to investigate in a way that dissuades survivors from coming forward.

This rule fundamentally disregards student’s civil rights under Title IX, which has helped pave the way for millions of women to access education.

Laura Meckler of the Washington Post notes, without a hint of irony, that women’s rights groups and Democrats are angry about these changes:

In publishing the proposal in November 2018, DeVos said the new rules would restore balance in a system that, in her view, had been skewed in favor of the accusers. She said her approach would provide clarity and fairness for victims and those accused of wrongdoing.

The proposal came under intense fire from women’s rights groups and Democrats, who said it would allow assailants and schools to escape responsibility and make college campuses less safe for women.

In other words, women’s rights groups and Democrats, who are willing to give Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt, don’t want the same presumption of innocence to apply to college students.

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