Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose By Debbie Osgood The U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has unveiled its newly-revamped Case Processing Manual. (Find the Manual here.) The procedural changes in the new Manual are critically important for complainants and recipients, including colleges and universities, involved in OCR’s complaint process.  The Manual, which takes effect today, will govern how OCR investigates and resolves discrimination complaints going forward. The new procedures largely formalize the “New Day at OCR” announced by OCR’s Acting Assistant Secretary ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose By Debbie Osgood and Jonathan Helwink HMBR is regularly invited to discuss the latest Title IX trends at trainings, sessions, and workshops with Title IX administrators and higher education leaders. We are often asked: What are the courts doing in student respondent litigation? What steps can we take to lessen our risks in this area? With these questions in mind, HMBR put together a summary – in chart form – of the key 2017 student respondent court cases across the country.  The 64 cases included are primarily from federal courts (with six appellate court de ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose By Debbie Osgood and Jonathan Helwink The website for the U.S. Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights (OCR), now includes a complete list of all open cases under investigation at OCR.  Unlike the widely-cited “Title IX Tracker,” which includes open OCR sexual violence cases at colleges and universities, OCR’s new list includes:  all schools and all of the civil rights laws enforced by OCR.  This means that the list includes cases open against colleges, universities, and elementary and secondary school districts and that the issues include ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose The story of the UPenn grad student, her twitter account, and her teaching techniques started like many of these stories.  The snowball started to roll when The Daily Caller, a popular conservative news site, ran a story entitled: “Ivy League Teaching Assistant Says She Calls on Black Women First, White Men Last.” Earlier in the day, The Chronicle of Higher Education article on the story read: “Grad Student Sounds Alarm Over Penn’s Response to Online Attacks.”  The following day, the article’s title at Campusreform.org read “UPenn TA Boasts of Calling o ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose Across the nation, college admission boards and administrations are beginning to plan ahead for a, potentially, major crisis on the horizon.  Between 2011 and 2016, college enrollment dropped by 8%.  The declines were concentrated mostly in community colleges and for-profit schools, however, public institutions saw declines as well.  Explanations for the decline have ranged from high profile student protests on campus turning off would-be enrollees to a gradual rebound in the national economy cooling returning students’ interest in revisiting the cl ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose On October 6th, Attorney General Jeff Sessions published guidance issued to all federal administrative agencies and departments interpreting religious liberty protections under federal law.  The memorandum, delivered pursuant to President Trump’s Executive Order in May, interprets existing protections of religious liberty and identifies twenty high-level principles that federal departments and agencies can put into practice to ensure religious freedoms are protected. Stating that “to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law, religious observance a ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose With Jay Rossello. On September 26th, federal officials announced criminal charges against ten individuals, including four college-basketball coaches.  The charges included bribery, corruption, and fraud.  To some, the charges are a black eye on college basketball, but not an indicator of systemic problems with the NCAA.  For others, the charges are an example of the graft and exploitation endemic to college sports and an opportunity to enact the major changes that they think college sports desperately need. While the specific allegations against ea ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose On Tuesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions sharply criticized what he considers incidents of college and universities suppressing free speech, creating “echo chambers” on campus, limiting student expression to “free speech zones,” and allowing protestors to shut down speakers they disagree with by using threats of violence.  While comparing mask-wearing, so-called, “anti-fascist” activists to members of the Ku Klux Klan, Sessions remarked that freedom of thought is under attack on campus and pointed to incidents at Middlebury and the University of California ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose With Jonathan Helwink On Friday, the Department of Education released a “Q&A on Campus Sexual Misconduct” along with a letter from Acting Assistant Secretary of the Office for Civil Rights, Candice Jackson withdrawing the Department’s 2011 “Dear Colleague Letter on Sexual Violence” and the 2014 “Q&A on Title IX and Sexual Violence.”  This new Q&A is intended to set forth the Department’s “current expectations of schools” in the “interim” while formal rules are crafted after a notice and comment period.  The Department indicated that it would ..read more

Hogan Marren Babbo & Rose The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday this week that the Department of Education will issue interim guidance on handling sexual assault investigations on college campuses in the next week or two.  Despite not reporting all of what the interim guidance will include, the Journal did report on one of the expected most-eagerly anticipated and controversial changes. According to the Journal, the interim guidance will permit schools to immediately adopt the higher “clear and convincing” evidentiary standard of proof in Title IX proceedings on college campus ..read more