The Biden Administration’s Department of Education (DOE) is making plans to reverse Title IX regulations that had been implemented by the Trump Administration to more greatly protect free speech rights in education.
The Daily Caller reports that the soon-to-be-unveiled rewrite by the Office of Civil Rights (OCR), focusing on Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments, will roll back the Trump-era rules dictating that public schools, from K-12 to college, must investigate claims of sexual misconduct in a fair an unbiased manner. The rules implemented by President Trump allowed greater rights to both the accused and the accuser in such cases, including the right to be represented by counsel, the ability to cross examine witnesses, and the presumption of innocence.
Legal experts said that the rollback, which would return to Obama-era Title IX standards, will essentially revert to a “guilty until proven innocent” approach towards accusations of sexual misconduct in education. Under those rules, accusations were treated as instances of unlawful sex discrimination, and were approached from a regulatory, rather than a legal, perspective.
When the Trump Administration revised the guidelines, the process became “quasi-judicial proceedings,” according to Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation Sarah Perry.
“It ultimately returns Title IX back to a guilty until proven innocent standard,” Perry explained, “as opposed to leaving it to one Title IX investigator to determine who was right and who was wrong, in a ‘he said, she said’ proceeding.”
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