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If you have been even peripherally involved in higher education in the United States, then you've heard of Title IX. But if you haven't, here's the U.S. government's blurb:
Title IX is most famous for requiring equal athletic opportunities for men and women, without regard for whether this makes (among other things) any financial sense at all. But Title IX also imposes a variety of reporting requirements on college and university faculty and staff, such that essentially every campus has a Title IX Coordinator (or similar), and many campuses maintain entire offices of Title IX administrative staff. Do they do real, important work? I would argue virtually never--these are bullshit jobs par excellence--with one enormous caveat: they serve as a lightning rod for both civil liability and federal intervention.
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.)
The Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights fields several thousand sex discrimination complaints every year. Less than 10,000, but close--the DoE's OCR fielded a record 9,498 complaints last year. But that's not the headline.
Here's the headline:
You probably read that right.* More than 77% of all sex discrimination complaints filed with the OCR are filed by a single person, at a rate of about 20 complaints per day--and this same individual was responsible for a similar number and percentage of complaints in 2016, and possibly other years as well. Of this person, the office says:
* I reserve the right to rapidly backtrack my commentary if it turns out that this "single person" being reported in their system is named "Anonymous" or "No Name Given" or something equally stupid. I am proceeding on the assumption that Catherine Lhamon is neither that stupid, nor being deliberately misleading, and that she did in fact say the things she is quoted here as saying. But I'm including this caveat because I still find it hard to believe that what is being reported is even possible. Part of me still thinks there must be some mistake.
On one hand, like... I'm kind of impressed? There's someone who has decided to make their mark on the world, clearly. That's some tenacity. On the other hand, what the fuck? Surely in any sane world someone would tell this person, "you are abusing the process, and we are going to change the rules to rate-limit your nonsense."
That is... well, not the plan, apparently:
In FY 1981 the office was still dealing with the fallout of the American government forcibly engineering feminist aims into higher education. At a current budget of $140 million (an average of $250,000 per employee), with very nearly half of its complaints (across all topics, not just sex discrimination) coming from a single individual, what is that additional $38 million supposed to accomplish?
It seems like no matter how dim my view of the federal government gets, there's always some new piece of information out there waiting to assure me that I've yet to grasp the depth of the graft, ineptitude, and corruption of Washington, D.C. I am skeptical that Title IX has accomplished anything of value that would not have been independently accomplished by market forces and social trends. But even if that's wrong, and the early days of Title IX were an important government intervention, I cannot imagine how this particular situation could possibly exist within a sane regulatory framework.
Could this person be the leader of some nonprofit or advocacy group? I’m struggling to imagine how that would be possible.
There are databases of active investigations (server issues?), pending cases, and incidents, but none make the plaintiff’s name public by default. Maybe this database has something? I’m not optimistic—if only a fraction of those 8,000 complaints are founded, they’re not going to be obvious in the active lawsuits.
Why doesn’t the Title IX office disclose this name? For obvious reasons, he or she is unlikely to be personally involved in most, if not all, of the cases. Privacy shouldn’t be an issue. I wonder if this is something that can be FOIA’d.
As I note in response to HaroldWilson below:
My only other half-plausible idea is that there is someone out there on retirement or disability or something who is doing stuff like collecting data on student athletes and filing a complaint any time they can find the slightest mathematical discrepancy in apparent sex balances in school athletic programs, or maybe faculty sex ratios or something. I don't know what else they could possibly find 20 complaints a day to file on, or how else they could be funded.
I know there are some bits of legislation out there that essentially pay bounties to people for filing lawsuits (there was a lawyer in California who was making a living for a while going to "ladies night" at bars and demanding equal pricing, then suing when denied, here's the one I think I'm remembering) but I'm not aware of any such setup for Title IX cases.
I don't know, but my first thought is that these things probably fall under FERPA, which is not as strict a piece of privacy legislation as, say, HIPAA, but it's still pretty strong.
Most of the Title IX complaints have nothing to do with athletics but allege that the University didn't sufficiently respond to complaints of sexual assault or harassment.
Where are you getting that? The article seems to suggest that, in both 2016 and 2022, most of the Title IX complains did deal with athletics. The complaints from 2021 (which don't appear in the graph) do appear to fit what you are saying, but also seem to suggest that 2021 saw far fewer complaints overall. Honestly it would be helpful if the author had included more information about each year. I am disinclined to try to dig it all up myself.
Yeah, sorry, I was looking at examples of cases that were actually filed. Upon rereading the article it's clear that it's usually the case that the majority of the claims are harassment, but the number was skewed by the one person filing a ton of athletic claims.
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