Before Cornell turmoil, successive US administrations seesawed in attitudes towards campus assaults

Amid renewed concerns about sexual assault on US college campuses following allegations that a student was gang-raped at a Cornell University fraternity, the Trump administration last week formally reversed measures from recent Democratic presidents concerning how schools should investigate such claims.

A federal judge had already in January 2025 struck down Biden-era regulations that expanded Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. The Democratic president tried to undo regulations established during Trump’s first term that, contrary to guidance from the Obama administration, required schools to adjudicate sexual misconduct claims through live hearings.

The back-and-forth between successive Democratic and Republican administrations, stakeholders on both the left and right say, has created a chaotic situation in the US in which the federal government has struggled to affect lasting change in how accusers and accused are treated in higher education when it comes to sexual assault allegations.

“To prevent this kind of ping-ponging between administrations, we need to see a congressional fix,” Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center, who opposes the Trump Title IX rule. “How do we ensure that these protections are made clear in a way that an administration cannot keep going back and forth depending on what their political agenda is?”

In 2011, the Department of Education, under Obama, issued what became known as the “Dear Colleague” letter, which stated that the agency was “deeply concerned” about a report stating that one in five women at two universities reported experiencing a completed or attempted sexual assault since entering college.

The letter stated that the department was “committed to ensuring that all students feel safe in their school, so that they have the opportunity to benefit fully from the school’s programs and activities” and included guidance on how schools should handle sexual misconduct allegations

In 2014, the department provided more specific directions, including that schools should use a “preponderance of evidence” standard, meaning that it was “more likely than not” sexual harassment or violence occurred rather than the stricter “clear and convincing evidence” standard many schools used.

The White House also discouraged schools from allowing parties in a hearing to question or cross-examine each other and praised a “single investigator” model that provided one person the authority not just to investigate alleged misconduct but to determine guilt and innocence, according to the Brookings Institution.

The Obama administration launched more than 300 investigations into schools over their handling of sexual abuse complaints. Catherine Lhamon, the then head of the education department’s office for civil rights (OCR), threatened to cut off federal funding to the schools but never did, according to R Shep Melnick’s book The Transformation of Title IX.

The office and 62 schools reached settlements, which included provisions such as agreeing to move to the “preponderance of evidence” standard.

Patel, an attorney who worked in the OCR under Obama, said that the guidance did not “force a specific type of investigatory or hearing procedure. It focused on fairness for both parties.”

The directives concerning how schools should handle hearings was intended to show schools that there are “different ways of conducting impartial hearings and investigations and questioning that is not retraumatizing” for the complainants, Patel said.

But critics said the administration had overreached. Students filed hundreds of lawsuits alleging that their due process had been violated in campus judicial proceedings, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech advocacy group.

The single-investigator model is problematic because it empowers just one person “who might have their own biases or blind spots or just might miss things because they are just a single person”, said Tyler Coward, the foundation’s lead counsel of government affairs. “Empowering one person to do all that is an enormous threat to due process, and that is why we don’t tolerate it in our criminal justice system.”

When Trump first took office in 2017, his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, rescinded the Obama administration’s guidance and issued a new Title IX rule for how colleges should handle sexual misconduct complaints.

The institutions should not use a single-investigator model and should hold a live hearing in which a party adviser, like an attorney, but not the parties themselves, can conduct cross-examinations, the rule stated. The schools could also use either the “preponderance of evidence” or the “clear and convincing evidence” standards.

After Biden took office in 2021, his administration tried to reverse many of those measures. Its new rule allowed colleges to use a single-investigator model and no longer required schools to hold live hearings.

But courts blocked the rule from taking effect, and in January 2025, days before Trump again took office, a judge struck it down.

The Trump administration immediately started using the 2020 rule and this week formally restored it. The rule, as compared to the one from Biden, also narrowed the definition of what is considered sexual harassment.

“The Trump rules really fall very short for many students because they really don’t cover the full scope of sexual violence and harassment that students can experience on campus and should deserve to get support around from their schools,” said Emma Grasso Levine, senior manager of Title IX policy and programs at Advocates for Youth, which aims to protect rights to bodily autonomy and sexual health.

Melnick, however, argues that the Trump rule prevents universities from “really having kangaroo courts”.

“It’s one of the few things from the first Trump administration that I would say they did a pretty thorough job,” said Melnick, a Boston College professor of American politics.

This might not be the end of the battle.

Like Patel, Robert Eitel, who served as senior counselor to the education secretary during the first Trump administration, said he doesn’t think the back-and-forth will stop until Congress passes a law mandating what institutions must do with such claims.

There has never been an opportunity for these “due process provisions to come into full force and effect”, said Eitel, who co-founded the Defense of Freedom Institute.

While such conservative groups applaud the measures taken by Trump, much of the public is again questioning whether schools are doing enough to stop sexual assault and hold alleged perpetrators accountable. At Cornell University, seven Chi Phi fraternity members are accused of raping a female student in 2024.

“Free pussy upstairs,” a message in a Snapchat group called Chi Phi Actives stated.

The district attorney in Ithaca, New York, stated that he did not file charges when the alleged victim reported the event to police in 2024 because she described her drug use and sexual conduct as voluntary, conscious and consensual.

But she has since filed a civil lawsuit against Cornell and the fraternity members over rape allegations, and the district attorney said he is now reopening the investigation.

“Individuals who are accused of committing a crime must be prosecuted based upon evidence and not public opinion, especially not public opinion based upon false information,” the district attorney stated in a letter explaining the decision. “However, recognizing that the process of healing from trauma is personal and different for every human, my office has reopened this investigation.”

The Ithaca mayor also issued a statement arguing that Cornell had “failed to hold the perpetrators to account” and called for a moratorium on all student activities, including Greek life.

The Cornell story “should hopefully raise alarm for anyone who has not been thinking that this is such a huge and gross problem”, Patel said “This is a cultural issue because there needs to be a lot more education. There needs to be a lot more institutional accountability.”

Cornell has said it took the reports of assault “very seriously” and “moved promptly to initiate its Title IX process”.