Betsy DeVos Declares An End to Weaponized Title IX Persecutions

The show isn't over,  and you get the distinct sense that political haymakers like Kirstin Gillibrand will fight this in the courts and elsewhere. The New York Times' story on the announcement contained a passage that is positively Orwellian in its revision of history (as ever, emboldening mine):

How to enforce Title IX, the 1972 law requiring schools to protect students from rape and sexual assault, is one of Ms. DeVos’s most difficult policy tasks, and her department has been under fire for comments made this week by Candice Jackson, who leads its Office for Civil Rights.

This is of course a fiction manufactured for public consumption that simply did not exist prior to the 2011 "Dear Colleague" letter. As the Reason story points out,

The problems with the Obama-era Title IX guidance are essentially threefold. First, it isn't obvious that Title IX—a one-sentence statute—could or should be read as having anything to do with violent crimes.

Secondly, the guidance raises constitutional questions, since it appears to many civil libertarians that a federal agency was instructing public institutions to violate the due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment. ...

Finally, since the guidance is legally dicey, it led to lawsuits left and right. Many students who were found responsible for sexual misconduct under the new guidelines have filed suit against their universities, and a nontrivial number of them have prevailed in court.

Emily Yoffe in The Atlantic has a well-timed story on the state of Title IX which hints at the problems to come: "Many college administrators have said they will not alter the adjudication policies now enshrined on their campus even if recent federal guidelines are rescinded; capacious campus bureaucracies that were created at the behest of Obama’s OCR are likely to resist change." The bureaucracy is its own constituency. People for whom "justice" is merely a matter of collecting sufficient scalps are unlikely to stop the head-carving just because they were told to. Defunding needs to happen, and soon.

Update 8:44 PM CDT: I had forgotten this exceptional tweetstorm from Walter Olson:

With @BetsyDeVosED today unveiling plans to revamp Obama rules on sexual assault and college discipline, here's a long tweetstorm... /1

— Walter Olson (@walterolson) September 8, 2017