The
Department of Education on Wednesday released its final Title IX campus sexual
assault regulations, despite the higher education community’s request to hold
off while campuses across the country remain closed due to the COVID-19
pandemic. The rules go into effect Aug. 14.
ACE
President Ted Mitchell sent a letter to
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos March 24 requesting a delay in issuing the
final rule until the COVID-19 emergency has passed. Given the serious
disruptions on campuses across the country, institutions simply do not have the
capacity to implement these proposals at this time.
Mitchell
said in a statement last
week that “choosing this moment to impose the most complex and challenging
regulations the agency has ever issued reflects appallingly poor judgment…We
urgently implore the department to re-think this. If it does nothing else, the
department should postpone the effective date to the summer of 2021 to enable
sensible planning and adoption of campus processes and procedures.”
ACE
and 60 higher education associations submitted comments on
the proposed rule Jan. 30, 2019. The 2,000-plus page final rule rejects
virtually all of these recommendations: It imposes a legalistic, prescriptive
’one-size-fits-all’ judicial-like process and assumes that institutions are a
reasonable substitute for the criminal and civil legal system. The associations
continue to believe that these final regulations will do more harm than good
and will hinder the effort to address sexual assault on campus in a manner that
is compassionate and fair to both parties.
For
more information on the rule, see ACE’s Title IX resource page.