https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/10/the-totalitarian-impulse-in-the-title-ix-racket/The Totalitarian Impulse in the Title IX RacketUntil 2015, I believed that the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague†letter, which called for universities to significantly broaden their interpretation of Title IX protections, was merely a way to address the so-called “rape crisis†on American campuses.
... Because of the biased media coverage of Title IX, most Americans still believe that its expansion is about protecting women and minorities.
But very few citizens understand that Title IX, in its new interpretation, is also about policing and disciplining speech on campus—especially speech that deviates from the orthodoxy of progressive politics. In 2015, I learned about the punitive dimensions of Title IX when I had a complaint filed against me.
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I am an “out†conservative at my university. That is to say that on campus, I am a minority of a minority. Not only am I a conservative, I don’t hide it (as many do). In English departments like mine, some estimates suggest liberals outnumber conservatives by as much as 48 to 1. Despite higher education’s enduring commitment to diversity by race, gender, religion, class, and sexual orientation, it has less interest in political diversity.
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A few weeks after the fall semester’s end in 2015, I was informed that one of my students was appealing the grades he received in two of the courses he had taken. In my graduate class, he had earned an 88.7 (a B+), but insisted he deserved an A. His grade was above the class average in my course. Both grade appeals were rejected by the dean. And then things got interesting.
In short order, I was informed by the Office of Equal Opportunity Services that someone had filed a Title IX complaint against me. ... In the early stages of my case, the university would not disclose the substance of the complaint.
The Kafkaesque nature of this process had me worried. My anxiety was amplified by the weeks I spent wracking my brain for any kind of interaction I had that might be construed as sexual harassment or misconduct. I kept coming up empty. The “investigation†would drag on for the better part of a year.
As information about my Title IX case began to emerge in the months after the complaint was filed, I learned the aggrieved party was indeed the same student who had appealed the grades in both of his courses.
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But the bombshell was yet to come: My in-the-know friend told me that the written complaint I had been furnished wasn’t the original complaint. My university is part of a system of schools, which all operate in a state on the gulf coast. The disgruntled student had originally submitted a written complaint at the proper office of my home university. When the original complaint was found to lack any actionable information, university representatives told him what an actionable complaint might look like. After that, the student filed the revised complaint at another university in our system, which (of course) was deemed an actionable complaint. I was not notified of the original complaint, nor of the university’s initial rejection of it.
In effect, a public college’s administrators coached a disgruntled student on how to make a bogus Title IX claim and how to make it look legitimate.
Once empowered, false accusations are very flexible. And when the prosecutor, judge, and jury are coaching the false accuser ...
