Senate Ought to Reject Biden’s Assistant Secretary of Schooling for Civil Rights, Dismantle Title IX

By On Jun 1, 2021

On May 13, the White House announced that it would appoint Catherine Lhamon as Assistant Secretary of State for Civil Rights at the Department of Education. Lhamon held the post in the Obama administration – with disastrous results.

During her tenure, she sponsored the so-called “Dear Colleague Letter,” a 2011 letter calling on all institutions receiving US federal funding to report allegations of “discriminatory harassment” – including alleged sexual harassment – in the context of an alleged one Federal mandate to investigate contained in Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

In a Kafkaesque distortion of the original purpose of Title IX, which was to ensure equal access for all sexes to college sports facilities, the country’s colleges and universities had to create bureaucracies to investigate and sanction alleged harassment. Failure to comply can result in the loss of all federal funds. “Don’t think it’s an idle threat,” Lhamon threatened a room full of university administrators crouched in front of her at a July 2014 conference at Dartmouth College. “It’s one that I’ve done four times in the 10 months of my tenure. So it’s one that is used a lot. “