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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25998 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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I don't get why a campus should want to police free speech at all.

Because, among other reasons, Title IX requires it, or so the theory goes. Allowing speech (including speech by other students) which is discriminatory as to gender sex is said to violate Title IX's guarantee:

No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.

I have no idea if the theory has been put forth that baldly and directly tested in court, but there's a lot of lawyers, administrators, and regulators who believe it.

And of course, once you've opened the door to speech regulation, there's always more that can be added.

This feels like a stretch.

Central examples of being subject to discrimination on the basis of sex would be:

  • Requiring different SAT scores for enrollment for male and female students
  • Requiring one sex to take extra coursework
  • Having different grading curves (e.g. for sports achievements) for both sexes (Minimally discriminatory grading curves would at least try to model the dependence of testosterone, size, weight and a ton of other factors on sports outcomes and then adjust for that instead of just treating the prepubescent nerd on the same scale as a jock who is halfway through puberty because they both have testicles.)

Someone who happens to be on campus saying someone mean about people who share the sex of a student seems like as non-central as you can possibly get.

Sure it's a stretch. But the people administering these regulations want to make that stretch, so they do, and there's no one to gainsay them.

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