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In her brief tenure on the federal bench, Amy Coney Barrett has proven herself to be a staunch originalist, which will make her an excellent Supreme Court Justice. President Donald Trump’s nomination of Barrett to fill the vacancy left by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a win for the president, the judicial branch and the American people, who are in dire need of a functioning, impartial third branch of government. The nomination can even be a victory for college students and universities, including Syracuse University, that have been entangled in Title IX legal battles for years now.

The framers of Title IX, a 1972 federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in education and federally-financed programs, set out on a top-down campaign to close the gender gap in youth and collegiate sports. To that extent, Title IX has been a massive success.

However, the current context in which Title IX is most often invoked has little to do with sports. The law has been redrawn beyond its original scope to combat sexual violence on college campuses. In that sense Title IX failed, leaving in its wake an excess of legal disputes.

The restructuring of Title IX under former President Barack Obama’s administration “compromised the realization of meaningful educational goals” and “imperiled due-process rights,” according to the American Association of University Professors.

On the federal bench, Barrett fought against these due-process abuses by safeguarding Title IX protections of male students and protecting them against discriminatory disciplinary processes.

A barrage of lawsuits relating to sexual assaults on college campuses have completely reanimated and recontextualized Title IX, sandwiching colleges between a rock and a hard place: be tough on sexual violence to mollify public outrage and avoid federal prosecution or open themselves up to lawsuits from potential victims of unfair and rushed disciplinary procedures.

The walls are closing in, and as colleges rush to meet the demand for justice, a new, predictable problem has arisen. SU is one among many universities that has found itself entangled in several legal battles that male students have launched, alleging SU’s disciplinary protocols violate Title IX.

A common thread among these lawsuits levied against colleges such as SU is the allegation that the school conducted an “inadequate and biased investigation”  that violates Title IX to the extent that the university discriminated against male students accused of sexual assault because they are men. 

Many of these Title IX cases stem back to the 2011 U.S. Department of Education’s “Dear Colleague Letter,” in which the department explains its sexual violence-centered reinterpretation of Title IX. This campaign, which the department and then-Vice President Joe Biden spearheaded, placed a titanic burden on universities to swiftly and indiscriminately quash sexual violence on their campuses by threatening to strip schools of federal funding should they fail to meet the department’s standards. 

Barrett pointed to the “Dear Colleague Letter,” in her majority opinion in the landmark 2019 case of Doe v. Purdue University. Barrett and the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously found the plaintiff’s claim that he faced sex-based discrimination during academic disciplinary hearings to be actionable.

Doe, whom the Purdue Advisory Committee on Equity had found guilty of sexual assault, was suspended from Purdue and expelled from the Navy ROTC program. Doe alleged the proceedings were a sham, and by all available evidence, he was indeed a victim of a kangaroo court bent on curbing sexual violence at the cost of due process.

Along with the “Dear Colleague Letter,” Barrett’s opinion also cited a Washington Post article titled “Alcohol isn’t the cause of campus sexual assault. Men are,” which was shared on Purdue’s Center for Advocacy, Response, and Education’s (CARE) Facebook page, as potential factors contributing to anti-man discrimination during Doe’s disciplinary hearings. 

The advisory committee refused to allow Doe to present exculpatory evidence and witnesses of the alleged assault. Doe’s accuser never participated in the proceedings herself, leaving only a statement that a CARE representative wrote on her behalf as the sole factor in the advisory committee’s determination of her credibility. Despite this, the advisory committee deemed her to be credible while refusing Doe a chance to provide potential evidence and witnesses to speak on his character.

Barrett explains in her opinion that such unfair university procedures can potentially deprive male students of “liberty interest” in violation of Title IX and the 14th Amendment. In the short time since the Seventh Circuit’s ruling, many courts across the country have cited Barrett’s opinion, including four other U.S. circuit courts.

Should cases such as Doe v. Purdue University, or those that SU students have filed against the university, work their way through the courts, it’s entirely possible that Barrett and her Supreme Court colleagues could review one of these cases, settling these Title IX matters with the weight of the Supreme Court’s constitutional authority.

The U.S. deserves a Justice Barrett, and for the sake of due process rights for all Americans, we should all hope she is given the opportunity to flex her incredible knowledge of the law and the Constitution on the high court.

 

Cesar Gray is a senior political science and government major. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at cfgray@syr.edu.

Published on October 5, 2020 at 10:58 pm