Title IX is a single sentence passed in 1972: no person 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 receiving federal financial assistance. The sentence was written to open college athletics and professional schools to women. Half a century later, the sentence is the governing law of the romantic and sexual lives of roughly twenty million American undergraduates. It tells universities when they must investigate a sexual encounter, what procedures they must use, what evidence they must consider, and what they must do to the accused. It is the most consequential planning instrument in the history of American intimacy, and almost nobody who falls under it has read it.
The instrument has been rewritten three times in a decade. The 2011 Dear Colleague letter from the Obama administration's Office for Civil Rights told universities they must adjudicate sexual assault under a preponderance-of-evidence standard, must not allow cross-examination of complainants, and must conclude proceedings quickly. The 2020 DeVos regulations under the Trump administration largely reversed this: cross-examination became required, the standard of evidence became the school's choice, and the definition of harassment narrowed. The 2024 Biden regulations attempted to swing back. The 2024 regulations were enjoined in much of the country before they took effect, and a 2026 court will likely write a fourth version. Universities have spent the decade rebuilding their compliance offices each time the federal weather changes.
The structural problem is that Title IX asks a single procedure to do incompatible things. It must protect complainants, who are often young, frightened, and have already been harmed. It must protect respondents, who are often young, frightened, and whose lives can be ended by an adverse finding. It must produce findings quickly, because the parties live in the same dormitories. It must produce findings accurately, because the findings are increasingly admitted as evidence in subsequent civil litigation. And it must do all of this with adjudicators who are not lawyers, in a forum that is not a court, under a federal statute whose text says nothing about any of these procedures.
The empirical landscape underneath the procedural fight is sobering. The AAU Campus Climate Survey, run across dozens of universities, has documented that roughly one in four undergraduate women report nonconsensual sexual contact during their college years; the rate for LGBTQ+ students is higher; the rate for men is lower but nontrivial. Only a small minority of these incidents are reported to the university or to police. The cases that reach Title IX adjudication are the visible tip of a far larger iceberg. Reforming the adjudication procedure, in either direction, addresses the tip and leaves the iceberg.
The romantic stakes are particular. College is, for many students, the first sustained period of unsupervised sexual life. The Title IX apparatus has become the implicit curriculum of that life: students learn what consent means by reading the campus policy, by attending the mandatory orientation module, by absorbing rumors about which encounters have led to which outcomes. The apparatus thus shapes the encounters, not only the responses to them. Some of the shaping is salutary—students are more likely now than a generation ago to ask explicitly, to check in mid-encounter. Some is corrosive—students sometimes describe sex as a risk calculation rather than an expression, calibrated to what could later be filed.
MacKinnon's original argument, that sexual harassment is sex discrimination, made Title IX available as the legal hook for campus sexual misconduct. The argument was correct and the hook has held. What the hook cannot do is substitute for a social fabric in which young people learn to negotiate desire before they encounter desire's hardest cases. A Title IX office is a hospital. A culture that does not break people in the first place is the public health system. American higher education has invested heavily in the hospital and starved the public health system, and the hospital is overwhelmed.
The collective question is what universities are for. If they are for credentialing labor, the Title IX apparatus is overhead. If they are for forming citizens—if the residential, intimate, formative dimension of college is part of the product—then Title IX is not overhead but core curriculum, and ought to be designed with the seriousness of any other core curriculum. The current design is the residue of fifty years of accreted regulation, litigation, and panic. A planned design would look different and is not yet politically possible.