Under the direction of President Joe Biden and leadership of Education Secretary Miguel Angel Cardona, the Department of Education has introduced a set of policy changes with the focus on using the Bostock v. Clayton County decision to extend anti-discrimination protections to LBGTQIA+ students without inhibiting the autonomy of religious institutions. The changes also elaborated on pregnancy law, made filing Title IX complaints easier for victims, and broadened the definition of harassment.
The changes maintain the Trump-DeVos religious exemption that allows JBU to continue to receive federal funding while also allowing for its LGBTQIA+ policies in its community covenant.
JBU’s Title IX Coordinator Amy Fisher explained that the administration is “thankful [the exemption is] still there so that as a religious institution, we can still … make decisions based on our faith.”
However, that does not mean that nothing changes at JBU. The Title IX proposed changes also seek to revert how complaints are handled to the Obama-era procedures.
Former Threefold Advocate writer Spencer Bailey explained some of the problems stemming from the current Title IX policy. He discussed the issues in his last Threefold Advocate article.
When asked about the major problems with Title IX at JBU, he described the scenario of a woman who refused to file a Title IX complaint. He said she cited “[having] to face her attacker” as the reason why they refused to file.
Fisher said that “having to sit across the table from that [as either party] is really harmful.”
Bailey described another scenario of a JBU student receiving death threats because of their sexuality. The response from the Title IX department was “never made public, [and] those people continue to remain on campus.”
Fisher and Julie Gumm, JBU’s chief marketing & communications officer, clarified in response to the same story Bailey discussed that under the current regulations, they can report a punishment to the victim if and only if the case is about physical assault, saying, “The reporting party [victim] needs to know what the sanctions are if it’s … an actual physical assault.” Therefore, they did not report to the victim of death threats by a group of students what punishment was given.
Another one of the issues Bailey described was the length of the Title IX process. He described it as “long and drawn out and boring and filled with paperwork and bureaucracy and red tape.”
When asked how long the Title IX process took, Fisher answered that cases “can take between 60 and 90 days even when things are moving pretty smoothly because there are some 10-day time frames built into.”
The University submitted comments in support of the proposed Title IX changes. Public feedback was allowed until the end of the day on Sept. 12. The proposed regulations garnered a total of 210, 594 comments, according to the Office of the Federal Register, which broke the previous record.
The Title IX proposed rules directly attack two of these issues, which according to Amy Fisher stem from Trump-DeVos era changes. Shep Melnick, Title IX writer and professor of American Politics at Boston College, said, “The Trump administration issued regulations that narrowed the definition of sexual harassment [and] required colleges to hold live hearings with cross-examination of witnesses.”
Both also hold that, quoting Melnick, “The Biden administration’s proposal does just the opposite: it broadens the definition, eliminates the live hearing and cross-examination requirements.” The latter of the two solutions aims to solve one of the three issues cited by JBU students.
In addition to these solutions, the Biden Administration is aiming to remove the timeframes that are a part of Title IX’s procedures. To quote the changes, “The Department proposes to remove the specific timeframes and instead permit a flexibility to set reasonable timeframes.” This will reduce the time needed for cases.
President Biden’s proposals seem to address most of JBU’s Title IX ailments with the support of JBU’s administration. Julie Gumm labeled negative perspectives of the Title IX department as “unfortunate” since the department “genuinely cares about the welfare of our students.” She said she hopes these changes will help to restore faith in the department.