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On Wednesday afternoon, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote, the Senate confirmed Catherine Lhamon to return as head of the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Wrongly accused students have the most to lose from Lhamon’s being back in power, but her nomination also offers insights into shortcomings of the man who nominated her, Joe Biden.Perhaps no figure in the past decade has been more associated with weakening the rights of accused students than Lhamon. Between 2013 and 2016, during her first stint at OCR, the Obama administration’s admirable goal of using Title IX to encourage universities to crack down on campus sexual assault devolved into pressure for one-sided procedures. Lhamon herself seemed to revel in the power. “Do not think it’s an empty threat,” she told one conference of campus administrators, addressing concerns that she would cut off federal dollars to any college or university that didn’t implement her preferred vision of Title IX adjudication procedures.Universities were hardly blameless in the moral panic that ensued, but even a prudent campus administration had reason to fear Lhamon. As Jackie Gharapour Wernz, who worked as an OCR lawyer during the Lhamon years, recalled last year, “We did see some bad cases in the Obama era, cases where it basically didn’t matter what evidence there was. The college was going to find against the defendant, the male defendant, no matter what. I think the schools felt pressure under the Obama guidance.”
