It applies to off campus events if the alleged perpetrator is a student at the college. If my daughter attended the same school as a Jesse Mathews I would hope the college would be doing everything they could to get him off campus.
deleted wrong thread
I’m pretty sure that if your boss is raping or stalking you away from the office, and you report it to HR and they do nothing, you’ll have an employment discrimination claim against your employer. I don’t think it has to happen physically in the workplace, or during work hours, to be actionable.
Yes, but students, as such, are not employees, they’re clients who buy educational services from the same company. Students, who reside in university housing, are not employees in that capacity, either, but tenants with the same landlord.
@JHS I think if you look at the timing of Jane Doe’s filing her sexual assault claim you will conclude she filed it in response to John Doe’s filing a complaint about her defamatory social media activity. She filed right after he filed.
Right. It looks like kind of an abusive complaint, retaliation for his complaint. Pointing out that it was 2-1/2 years after the fact is slightly unfair, since she had been claiming that he assaulted her on social media for 1-1/2 years of that period, although of course it also looks like that claim and the corresponding complaint were based on “alternative facts.”
Meanwhile, the guy’s complaint was kind of ridiculous as a Title IX complaint, since it really doesn’t have anything to do with sex discrimination. It wasn’t a ridiculous complaint at all – it seems like he had something legitimate to complain about – but it takes some huge leaps of imagination to make it a case about sex discrimination as opposed to harassment and defamation.
This isn’t some Title IX horror story about an innocent boy whose life was ruined because he hooked up with a girl when they were both drunk and months later some radical feminist convinced her that her ambivalence about the hookup meant she had been raped. Apart from having to respond to two women who claimed he assaulted them – does anyone think he shouldn’t have to do that? – and changing a Physics section to accommodate one of the accusers even after a panel had decided against her, nothing bad has happened to him because of Chicago’s Title IX process. The Physics section thing is a close call, I can certainly understand people thinking that was not justified. (In my case, what I think of it could well be affected by how close she came to winning her original complaint, something we know nothing about).
All of that is hardly much of a basis for the guy’s $1.3 million damage claim. Like Emma Sulkowicz with her mattress at Columbia, he’s engaging in political performance art rather than trying to resolve his actual problems.
And of course there is more to the story with the Physics Lab change. The Title IX panel issued a “no contact” order against both of them - neither was to directly or indirectly contact the other. Although I don’t know exactly what transpired, John Doe’s adult sister contacted Jane Doe --I believe via social media-- which was a breach of the order. Jane Doe complained about that breach and about being assigned the same physics lab. So they switched him out – I suppose partly because of the breach of the no contact order.
I was rebutting this claim:
“so Title IX in general is being applied off premises in a way no other business would even consider”
Whether something happens off premises isn’t that relevant to either Title IX or Title VII (employment discrimination). I don’t agree that students are customers the way restaurant diners are customers. Schools have a statutory responsibility toward them that is much more like an employer relationship.
Correction in my#66 - meant to reference Jane Roe not Doe – the lab change was related to Roe.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to rebut. I certainly agree that Title IX forces colleges to treat students as something akin to employees. Having a federal law, which forces a small subset of businesses to manage their customers in the same way a business manages its employees, is an anomaly that exists nowhere else in the “real world” that @JHS was referring to earlier.
@roethlisburger What is your point? The relationship between a college – especially a residential college – and its students is pretty much sui generis. Sure, the students are customers, but unlike most customers they are in some ways locked in to a long-term relationship and in some ways completely free to leave. Also, unlike most customers, except for those at Club Med or Canyon Ranch, and unlike almost all employees after adoption of the 13th Amendment, it’s a 24-7 relationship, encompassing every aspect of life, and unlike Club Med or Canyon Ranch it goes on for months at a time. Plus, at some important level, the college is supposed to be making them work (like employees) and evaluating them on a tough standard. And most of them are young, barely past the age when as a formal matter we consider them capable of independent judgment, and well short of the age at which we feel comfortable relying on their independent judgment. Also, many of them are not financially independent or particularly financially responsible.
That’s a unique, difficult relationship that’s unlike any other. But it’s not uncommon. At any time there are millions of students at hundreds of colleges in that weird situation. There are about 12 million college students under 25 right now. It’s to be expected that there might be some industry-specific rules and practices.
@jhs, the above sounds like the beginning of an argument that UC had some duty to stop the “harassing” conduct here? I didn’t think that was your view?