Congress Wants a Say in the Title IX Debate. What Might That Look Like? – The Chronicle of Higher Education
Campus sexual assault should be addressed in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, U.S. senators emphasized during an education-committee hearing on Tuesday.
The question is how legislation might complement the Title IX regulations that Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education, has proposed — and, given how controversial the draft rules are, whether lawmakers can agree on what that legislation should look like.
Most of the hearing was spent discussing three of the most hotly debated components of the proposed rules: the requirement for cross-examination in live hearings, the fact that colleges would no longer have to investigate many off-campus assaults, and the narrower definition of sexual harassment.
DeVos’s new regulations, as well as Education Department guidance documents, will continue to do much of the work of interpreting Title IX on campus, said Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, who is the committee’s chair.