The College Fix

The third bill overhauling sexual-assault reporting regulations for colleges this week not only lacks any due-process provisions for accused students – it would also give the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights the authority to impose unlimited fines on colleges in violation.

The Hold Accountable and Lend Transparency (HALT) on Campus Sexual Violence Act, sponsored by Reps. Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, and Patrick Meehan, Republican of Pennsylvania, follows Wednesday’s introduction of the Campus Accountability and Safety Act in the Senate and Survivor Outreach and Support Campus Act in both chambers.

The HALT bill would give students a “private right of action” – the right to sue for damages – against their colleges for not meeting campus safety requirements;  provide “public disclosure” of agreements between colleges and the Department of Education;  require annual “climate surveys” of sexual violence on campus;  and create an “interagency task force” to increase coordination and enhance investigations, among other provisions, according to a press release from Speier’s office.

Much of the bill’s content was previewed in a letter signed by Speier and three dozen more lawmakers to the department’s civil rights office in January.

Speier referred to the disputed statistic that one in five women will be sexually assaulted in college as a “fact.”

“Students and parents deserve to know which institutions are safe and that failure to protect victims results in tangible consequences,” Speier said. “Many colleges have swept these crimes under the rug to avoid bad publicity, loss of enrollment and federal funding.”

In contrast to the Campus Accountability and Safety Act (CASA) and its provision giving the Department of Education the authority to fine a college 1 percent of its operating budget for each violation, Speier’s bill has no such limit, Joseph Cohn, legislative and policy director for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said Friday.

The relevant section of the Speier bill says the department shall determine the fine it issues to a school “by the gravity of the violation,” with no other qualification, Cohn noted.

Hold Accountable and Lend Transparency on Campus Sexual Violence Act

The CASA bill already provides a “perverse incentive” to the department’s Office of Civil Rights to “find violations” by giving the office the money it collects from schools, but the Speier bill has “literally no limit to the amount of the fines” the office could impose, Cohn said.

The department has a poor track record when it comes to using its authority in sexual assault cases, lowering the standard of evidence required to find guilt and taking no action against universities for violating accused students’ rights, Cohn said. Schools are also “reducing the rights of accused” to avoid government scrutiny, he added.

Know Your IX, which calls itself a “survivor-run, student-driven campaign to end campus sexual violence,” said in a Thursday statement it was pleased the Speier bill “would create real sanctions for schools violating students’ civil rights” through the Office of Civil Rights’ fining authority.

“Because the OCR’s only current sanctioning power—denying a school all federal funding—would devastate students, Know Your IX has advocated for intermediate fining authority since our launch last summer,” the group said.

Greg Piper is an assistant editor of The College Fix. (@GregPiper)

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