The U.S. Department of Education has stopped providing details on sexual-violence investigations resolved by its Office for Civil Rights, after changing its approach to public disclosure of that information some two months ago.
To understand the shift, let’s wind back the clock to 2014. In May of that year, the department publicly identified the colleges that it was investigating over their handling of issues related to sexual violence. After that, it updated its list of investigations on a weekly basis, and provided the list to the news media upon request.
Under the Obama administration, the number of active investigations soared to more than 300 cases at colleges and universities across the country.
The Chronicle used that information as the foundation of its Title IX tracker, which sheds light on how the government’s approach to enforcing the gender-equity law has changed over time. That approach has shifted radically under President Trump’s secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.
DeVos’s department has sharply scaled back the scope of its Title IX investigations and is resolving them more quickly. It rolled back key Obama-era guidance about how colleges should respond to reports of sexual violence, and has announced plans to replace that guidance entirely.
That brings us to January, when the department changed how it handles the weekly list of sexual-violence investigations, too.
Instead of releasing the list each week, it began publishing an expanded version on its website. The new database covers a range of civil-rights laws beyond Title IX, and it shows inquiries at both secondary and postsecondary institutions. The department said in January that the new site would be updated on the first Wednesday of each month.
Since then The Chronicle has monitored the site for changes. For weeks we’ve asked the department for basic information about cases that have been added to the database and those that have dropped off with each update. Under the Obama administration, the civil-rights office typically confirmed the dates of resolved cases and explained the ways those investigations had been resolved, such as through a resolution agreement, administrative closure, or other means.
Key Information Left out
Although the new website provides a broader look at the types of investigations undertaken by the civil-rights office, it’s missing key information about the government’s enforcement activities.
For instance, the website does not identify which investigations have been resolved with each update. It also does not identify the manner in which those investigations were resolved, or the findings of those cases (that is, whether a college was found to have violated Title IX).
According to a Chronicle analysis of changes in the new site, the civil-rights office has opened four sexual-violence investigations and resolved 24 others since mid-January.
We asked the civil-rights office, often called OCR, to confirm details about those investigations, such as the resolution dates of cases that had dropped off the list and the findings of those inquiries.
Instead of turning over that information, a department spokesman provided this statement to The Chronicle on Thursday:
“OCR publishes the list of all cases under investigation as a public service. Users may determine new cases based on the ‘open investigation date.’ Should an investigation result in a resolution agreement with an institution, OCR typically publishes the agreement on its website as soon as it has been reviewed for privacy concerns and personally identifiable information, and other sensitive information has been removed. To search for resolution agreements, please visit OCR’s case resolution search engine online. OCR has no plans at this time to provide a further breakdown of the investigations data.”
Despite the department’s refusal to provide such a breakdown, colleges have sometimes offered up details on investigations that took place on their own campuses. For example, when the government recently resolved a long-running Title IX investigation at the University of California at Berkeley, the university itself announced the resolution and posted documents on its website. The department’s investigation found that some of Berkeley’s practices had been out of compliance with Title IX, and raised particular concerns about the length of the university’s process for disciplining faculty members.
The Chronicle will continue to pursue information about the government’s Title IX investigations through the Freedom of Information Act. And we’ll post the documents we obtain to our Title IX tracker.
Nick DeSantis is an editor who supervises coverage of daily news across all areas of academe. Email him at nicholas.desantis@chronicle.com.
