Weaponizing Title IX serves politics

What happens on campus with Title IX spills over into broader society and vice versa. It’s always been thus in a general way but lately we’ve seen different groups weaponizing Title IX to fight off-campus battles.

Social change movements always have influenced Title IX’s use on campus. The civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the LGBT rights movement, and the movement against sexual violence contributed to Title IX’s creation and helped give women and men the self-agency to use Title IX as a tool for progress. Title IX’s application then changed not only campus life but society outside of academia. More women with advanced degrees led to more female doctors, lawyers, and other professionals. More girls and women in school athletics produced female sports stars and championships. The uprising on campuses against sexual violence especially in the past decade fed into the #MeToo movement across society. The effects of all that flow back to education institutions and programs and then back out into society in a virtuous circle of change that I like to call iterative feminism.

In a twist on this, recently people have tried to use Title IX to jump straight to influencing a political issue, almost (but not entirely) bypassing whatever campus issue the Title IX complaint claims to address.

Brett Cavanaugh at Senate Judiciary Committee hearings (Photo from CSPAN via Wikimedia Commons)

The triggering off-campus issue: Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

Multiple students at Harvard University filed Title IX complaints after several women elsewhere alleged he’d been involved in sexual assaults as a young man and Prof. Christine Blasey Ford testified that a drunken Kavanaugh had tried to rape her. Students argued that Kavanaugh’s presence as a teacher at the Law School if he returned from leave would create a hostile climate for women, especially assault survivors. The filings seemed designed to contribute to the broader movement opposing Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court as much as it was concerned about the campus climate. The issue became moot a few days later when Kavanaugh announced he would not return to Harvard and ultimately when the Senate confirmed his nomination.

Still, the student organizers felt something positive came out of it. ““I hope that, as students file these complaints and engage with this process of singling out accusers and harassers on campus, that it actually can be seen that this process is a little less formidable than the reputation of the process is on campus,” one organizer said.

Kavanaugh on CSPAN (via Wikimedia Commons)

The same day the Harvard complaints hit the news, Georgetown University Associate Professor C. Christine Fair tweeted some of the rage that many women were feeling about the Kavanaugh nomination and what they saw as biased hearings, with Sen. Lindsey Graham and others yelling at witnesses. She posted on her personal Twitter account: “Look at thus chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”

Fair is not one to shy away from public comment. She’s the one who confronted white supremacist Richard Spencer in a private gym and got him kicked out.

One day after media reported her tweet, the National Coalition for Men filed a Title IX complaint against Georgetown University, calling for Georgetown to fire Fair. Conservative groups often wave the First Amendment to justify anything they like to say, but I guess Fair’s tweet didn’t fit their agenda.

The Coalition pointed to the case of a dean at Catholic University of the Americas who’d been suspended the day before for a tweet that likened one of Kavanaugh’s accusers to a pedophile — a tweet he posted from his official university account, by the way. Not the same action as Fair’s.

Oh, and by the way, the Coalition complaint alleged that Georgetown violates Title IX by its affiliations with any and all programs, lounges, scholarships, and organizations focused on women, even if no men have applied and been rejected.

Their Title IX complaint appeared to have much less to do with any specific Title IX issue on campus and more about fighting broader culture wars and the political battles triggered by Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Title IX has proved to be a weapon for good when in the right hands for the right reasons. But there’s nothing to keep anyone who has access to it from using Title IX in ways that weren’t intended.