Harvard Law Professors Describe Creation of ‘The Sex Bureaucracy’
By Zach Greenberg January 11, 2017
Last week, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an analysis by Harvard Law School professors Jacob Gersen and Jeannie Suk Gersen in which they take a comprehensive look at the creation of what they term “the sex bureaucracy,” a system in which “the feds have made colleges clumsy monitors of students’ sex lives.” The authors explore the how the federal government tried to use Title IX to fight campus sexual violence but instead wound up “enforcing a contested vision of sexual morality and disciplining those who deviate from it.”
In their piece, Gersen and Suk Gersen cover many of the issues FIRE has spoken out on, such as the twisting of Title IX through the Office for Civil Rights’ unduly broad definition of sexual harassment and the shaky legal ground of OCR’s mandate that schools use a “preponderance of the evidence” standard when adjudicating sexual misconduct cases. They explain how enforcing these provisions “created a sex bureaucracy that has in turn conscripted officials at colleges as bureaucrats of desire, responsible for defining healthy, permissible sex and disciplining deviations from those supposed norms.”
https://www.thefire.org/harvard-law-professors-describe-creation-of-the-sex-bureaucracy/
