Title IX abuses allow bureaucrats to surveil the sex lives of students

In yet another example of how overreaching federal regulations invariably causes a host of unintended consequences, colleges are now, essentially, micromanaging the sex lives of students thanks to the blank check lawmakers gave them under the Title IX Education Amendments of 1972.

That wasn’t Congress’s original intent, however. It created a law meant to ensure there was no discrimination against the sexes for college athletics. But as is always the case, bureaucrats have turned the regulations into a virtual free-for-all to cover all sorts of conduct, even the private sexual encounters among students.

Here’s what the law states, plainly:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

But finding a loophole has made it so that college administrators are now “micromanage[ing] the sex lives of students,” as Glenn Reynolds writes about in his USA Today op-ed. It also “subject[s] them to Orwellian levels of surveillance, investigation and supervision.”

“In essence, students now risk being kicked out of school for not getting express consent for every sexual act, all based on a law that was intended, 45 years ago, to end discrimination in college athletics,” Reynolds added.

Two Harvard Law School professors, Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk, describe the interpretation most succinctly as a “bureaucratic sex creep.” Reynolds adds that it has become “a regulatory Tower of Babel governing sports teams, student discipline and even, and most dubiously, sexual consent.”

Here’s how Title IX has worked out so far. A University of Kentucky professor sang the Beach Boys’ California Girls and was punished for “sexual misconduct” because the lyrics were sexual in nature. And according to The American Interest:

[C]olleges are enlisting student resident assistants (typically, senior students who live in lower-class dorms) as “mandatory reporters” of possible Title IX violations, including “harassing remarks” they might hear…

The resident assistants are instructed to not be selective about what information they report to the authorities. They are to pass along to superiors anything they see or hear that could potentially run afoul of the growing web of sexual harassment rules and regulations: “RAs should be ‘funnels of information’,” a Title IX bureaucrat told the Chronicle. “Don’t try to sift and sort. Is this Title IX? Is this not Title IX?’ Let the Title IX administrator do that.”

So, instead of ensuring a female isn’t passed over team selection simply because of her gender, Title IX has been interpreted to go after protected speech and even consensual sexual acts. The possibilities are endless as Reynolds theorizes:

Perhaps policies that discriminate against fraternities could become grounds for loss of funding based on discrimination. (Especially if university officials use derogatory sexist terms like ”frat boy.”) Perhaps admissions criteria that lead to student bodies that are disproportionately female could be analyzed for discrimination under “disparate impact” theories. Perhaps a sexual assault program that produces overwhelmingly male defendants despite evidence that women are equally likely to be perpetrators might be seen as prima facie evidence of sex discrimination by universities.

There is a common-sense solution to all of this, as Reynolds notes, and that is, letting law enforcement handle sexual assault allegations and start viewing free speech, sexual or otherwise, as opinion and not “discrimination” or “microaggressions.” And if Donald Trump’s administration can’t somehow get college administrators to honor the constitutional rights of its students and to cease Title IX abuses, then perhaps America will realize how important calling an Article V Convention of States is in reining in these bureaucratic overreaches.