This article examines the questions of whether Title IX investigations are, or are not, legal proceedings where the accused ought to enjoy certain legal protections, and the clear thing here is that many advocates are playing it both ways--they are not legal proceedings when it would give rights to the accused, but they are legal proceedings when it would allow accusers to pursue further redress of grievances. So it is, more or less, a quasi-legal game of "Calvinball", where one party changes the rules to his benefit, generally when his pet tiger Hobbes starts winning the game.
More importantly, in my view, is the question of what the result is of a Title IX-induced expulsion, and my best guess is that in most cases, the university to which one might transfer would deny admission, at least for a time, to such a student. So in a very real way, a Title IX expulsion is going to follow a person around in the same way that a criminal conviction will. The person will be pushed out of any number of career paths--career paths that tend to pay better than those that do not require a college degree.
And in my view, that means that when a student is accused of some sexual mispropriety, legal rights need to apply. Yes, it will make the process much more expensive and difficult, but quite frankly, that is a feature, not a bug, of the system.
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