A New Diagnosis of the Title IX Problem: Barriers to Ending Campus Sexual Harassment and Sexual Violence through Civil Rights Law

In this dissertation, I examine how various stakeholders shaped the meaning of compliance with Title IX sexual harassment laws in the United States. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is a widely recognized law that is intended to achieve gender equality in education, and more recently, has been used to address campus sexual violence. However, experts have questioned whether Title IX has actually reduced gender and sexual violence in educational settings. Extant literature suggests that university administrators constructed the meaning of Title IX law to defend the interests of the university over the rights of targets of harassment, rendering Title IX ineffective in fulfilling its intended function. These scholars draw from socio-legal studies on Title VII that explore the relationship between law and organizations and show how organizations construct anti-discrimination policies mainly to shield themselves from liability. Situated in a tradition of scholarship that studies the relationship between law, organizations, and social movements, I advance knowledge on Title IX by considering the role that various stakeholders play alongside university administrators in altering the meaning of Title IX. My study is based on the University of California (UC). I draw on multiple, qualitative methods: a historical genealogy of Title IX (case law, statutory law, and administrative law), a genealogy of Title IX policy in the UC, 30 interviews with survivor advocates in the UC, 30 interviews with UC Title IX administrators, and a focus group study of 73 college age women in the UC. In Chapter Two, I argue that legal strategies by feminist survivor advocates and university administrators enabled the men’s rights movement to weaken Title IX. In Chapter Three, I account for why feminist survivor advocates and Title IX administrators used the legal strategies that they did, pointing to fissures in the feminist movement about the task of Title IX. In Chapter Four, I argue that because white activist women originally lead the charge to get universities to comply with Title IX, non-activist women of color have long been marginalized in the law shaping process