Shep Melnick on Title IX: Equity, Due Process, and Free Speech on Campus

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

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🗓️ 2 December 2021

⏱️ 87 minutes

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Summary

In a recent essay, Shep Melnick, a distinguished scholar of American politics at Boston College, writes: Few federal laws have achieved their initial objective more completely than Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Yet today Title IX is more controversial than ever before. The story of its evolution is a cautionary tale about how good intentions and broadly shared goals can become distorted over time by aggressive cultural combat, and how hard it can be to reverse the damage. In this Conversation, and expounding on themes addressed in his book The Transformation of Title IX: Regulating Gender Equality in Education, Melnick traces the transformation of Title IX from 1972 until the present. Conceived as an initiative that would prevent sex discrimination on campus, Title IX, as Melnick explains, became a catchall source for rules and regulations in higher education regarding sexual assault, sexual harassment, and offensive speech. Melnick argues that the Obama administration's heavy-handed approach to Title IX enforcement created serious threats to due process and free speech on campus. Melnick praises the more recent efforts of the Department of Education in the Trump administration to roll back some of these problematic guidelines. Finally, he considers why the Biden administration—and universities and colleges—are hesitant to return to the Obama-era policies.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very pleased to be joined today by an old friend,
0:20.3	Chef Malnick. I shouldn't say old, just a friend, Chef Malnick, not each other since grad school,
0:25.2	so that's a bit of a long time at the stage in our lives. But Chef is the Tip O'Neil Professor
0:32.3	of Political Science at Boston College, a very distinguished student of American politics and
0:38.6	government institutions, legislation, bureaucracy, and we're going to talk today about Title IX about
0:45.2	which Chef wrote a very fine book two, three years ago, The Transformation of Title IX, and I guess
0:51.4	you have a book forthcoming also in school, desegregation. Next year, I think so. Those are both
0:56.0	very interesting topics in their own right, substantively, and of course case studies in legislation,
1:02.6	implementation, bureaucracy, the courts, and so I hope we can use this discussion of Title IX to
1:08.4	kind of shed some light on sort of how American government works more broadly as well as
1:13.2	very interesting topics raised by Title IX. So Chef, thanks for joining me today.
1:17.6	Oh, it's a great pleasure to be here. And let's get to it. I really look forward to this
1:23.7	discussion. So the 50-year saga, I guess it's almost 50 years of Title IX, and give people some
1:31.1	sense. So what is Title IX? What is Title IX? Title IX of, you know, we'll talk about Title IX
1:36.3	without ever thinking like what piece of legislation is that actually the ninth title of? So give a
1:41.2	little history of how we got from there to here. Sure. It really is a great example of how
1:47.0	American politics works. Title IX was an insignificant part of the 1972 omnivast education
1:57.4	amendments. What can be more boring than that? It was added on the House, in the House Committee,
2:05.6	and then on the Senate floor, with virtually no debate. It simply says that in any program for
2:13.5	education that receives federal funds, those programs cannot discriminate or exclude on the
2:20.6	basis of sex. It was modeled on Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, a very important part of the
2:28.0	Civil Rights Act that said that any recipient of federal funds cannot discriminate on the
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