Like most people in Washington, D.C., and other major cities, Betsy DeVos is doing her job remotely, almost exclusively communicating with her staff at the Department of Education through phone calls and video conferences. Except DeVos is not in Washington. She’s at her home in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
That’s where she’s doing her day-to-day work, and when she’s not doing that, she’s passing the time by going on walks and bike rides, and by completing puzzles. “I like the challenge,” she said in an interview with the Washington Examiner. “Yeah, it’s a fun thing to see all those pieces together and actually have something finished and completed.” She said the completed images are mostly photographs, vistas of the Italian shoreline or geographical collages. “Things that are interesting to me.”
And oh, yeah: DeVos just revealed a new order on sexual harassment with ramifications for every corner of the country. It may very well shift the balance of campus culture — and perhaps beyond.
On May 6, DeVos announced the department’s highly anticipated rule changes to Title IX, the civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination within the school system. Since the Obama administration’s now-famous “Dear Colleague” letter issued to school administrators in 2011, the issue has become a focal point in the culture clash encompassing both the rights of women to pursue action against sexual harassers and the rights of the accused to defend themselves.
DeVos was confirmed as education secretary in February 2017. Seven months later, she rescinded the informal guidance laid out in the “Dear Colleague” letter, which many believed was coercive in instructing school administrators, particularly in higher education, to resolve sexual harassment disputes in ways that were too often unhelpful and unfair, including to the victims of the sexual misconduct.
The new rules mandate that victims have a say in what action the school takes in responding to a claim, which the victim may not want to result in a formal process that introduces a public record of defendants, witnesses, and evidence that might lead to personal embarrassment or additional emotional trauma. As an alternative, the department will require that schools offer other supportive measures, such as counseling, class and dorm reassignments, and no-contact orders.
She said that getting into the weeds on sexual assault was not something she had thought would become perhaps the issue that defines her legacy.
“By the time I was confirmed, that was certainly high on the list,” she said of the “Dear Colleague” letter. “But very honestly, when I was first approached for the job, I certainly was not aware of all of the issues facing higher education” on the subject.
One of those issues is adjudicating campus sexual assault in the #MeToo era.
“It wasn’t so much the letter itself,” DeVos said of her gut reaction to the fallout from what had become the new normal for students, mostly young men, facing allegations of sexual misconduct. “It was the implications of what the letter actually resulted in, and, you know, at the beginning of this process, sitting with a number of groups of individuals, of survivors who told their stories, of those who were falsely accused who told their stories, and then with college administrations and chief legal counsel and those who were charged with actually running these processes, it was heart-wrenching to hear some of the stories that I heard.”
After the department reined in the guidelines in 2017, DeVos and her team began the process of drafting new ones, this time going through the legal channels that would give her rule changes the force of law, which the previous ones did not have.
The three department staffers heading up the operation were women, Candice Jackson, Brittany Bull, and Farnaz Thompson. Jackson and Bull hosted information-gathering sessions with students, school administrators, and legal experts in sexual harassment. They organized interpersonal discussions between those same people and the secretary. And along with Thompson, the three of them were part of the process in reviewing comments on the new guideline proposals submitted by the public. Both Jackson and Thompson helped draft the final rule.
DeVos said the listening sessions with both survivors of sexual harassment and the wrongfully accused were sobering experiences. “I remember after one of them, I just had to have some quiet and space just to sort of think through and reflect on what I heard,” she said. “It was hard. It was very difficult.”
Immediately after DeVos announced the rule change, the Biden campaign released a statement denouncing it as an attempt to “shame and silence” sexual abuse survivors. He promised a “quick end” to it should he be elected.
Yet his certainty was notable: Joe Biden had just a few days prior been engulfed in his own sexual harassment controversy, which included a cringe-inducing interview on MSNBC. In that interview, Biden denied the claim by Tara Reade, a former staffer in his Senate office, that he had some 30 years ago forcefully penetrated her with his fingers without her consent. But more importantly, he had also changed his position when it comes to presuming the truth about allegations of sexual misconduct.
He said that such allegations need to be taken “seriously,” but then you “vet it.” That’s different from what he said during the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. What he said then was, “You’ve got to start out with the presumption that at least the essence of what she’s talking about is real.”
DeVos noticed the shift. “Reading the statement, I thought he could not possibly have written that himself because he can’t possibly believe what he actually released given where he was in that moment in time,” she said. “A total hypocrite. Right? I mean, he was asking for what the rule has actually guaranteed for everyone, the presumption of innocence, at a time when he wanted something totally different for a 19- or 20-year-old college student. So, it’s a total hypocritical position for him to take, and I was, frankly, disgusted.”
Right-leaning journalists have extensively covered the controversies on college campuses, wherein male students accused of sexual harassment were given little, if any, opportunity to defend themselves. Contrary evidence was dismissed as irrelevant, witnesses deemed inadmissible.
DeVos’s rule changes, among other things, aim to correct what she said was a botched attempt at social engineering.
“Surprising to me was when coming in just how evident it was that the previous administration had been, not only on this issue, but a host of issues, just on an epic power trip,” she said, “and were trying to inculcate every piece of their view of how culture should be into every policy of that department.”
The Obama administration, with Arne Duncan as education secretary, “clearly laid the groundwork for the #BelieveAllWomen movement,” she said, “and I think you can draw a direct line from that to the whole Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process, and I don’t think that was a mistake. I think that was intentional.”
The rule changes offer a clearer definition of “sexual harassment” as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature” that is “objectively offensive.” That includes physical sexual assault and any quid pro quo engaged in by a faculty member who seeks sexual favors in exchange for educational benefit.
The changes also lay out a process for school administrators to adjudicate sexual harassment claims, mandating a live hearing on the allegations and the right of the accused to submit evidence and witnesses as a defense. Accommodations are made for victims who do not wish to face the accused, but it is now built into the process that those facing allegations of harassment have ample opportunity to make their case.
That’s the part that has bothered a lot of Democrats.
In early June, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with several other Democrats, including Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, signed a letter to DeVos asking her to rescind the changes. “In general, the rule makes it harder for survivors to feel comfortable coming forward,” the letter said. “By requiring the schools to presume there was no wrongdoing, students coming forward will have the impression the school assumes they are not telling the truth.”
The changes to Title IX, the letter said, were “harmful for students.”
DeVos, however, says that anyone who reads the new rules with an objective view will find them to be fair, including Democrats who are backing Biden for president, despite the allegations by Reade. “We do need to ensure that individuals are heard and that guilt is not presumed, but [Democrats] are trying to have it both ways,” she said. “And Joe Biden is chief among them.” Their due-process-for-me-but-not-for-thee standard puts them “in a box.” She added, “I mean, you hear a number of people say that, well, I might believe Tara Reade, but, you know, I hate President Trump — essentially, I hate President Trump so much that I’ll look the other way. Well, what kind of an example does that set for the rising generation?”
In our 45-minute interview, DeVos seemed frustrated. She was frustrated that policy changes didn’t happen quicker, if the bureaucracy allowed them to happen at all; frustrated that many career government employees in her department didn’t seem to share her view; and, incidentally, frustrated that her lasting mark as education secretary will be on sexual harassment, rather than on how younger children are educated in the system.
Polls here and there show that DeVos is cited as the least popular Cabinet member in the Trump administration, an effect likely attributable to the brutal confirmation process she faced, and which ended in a tie-breaking vote required by Vice President Mike Pence. The aggressive campaign against her by Democrats and liberal education activists who painted DeVos as a rich and unqualified elitist apparently took its toll.
“I don’t feel good about being misinterpreted or misunderstood or having allegations leveled that are absolutely untrue,” she said. “I don’t relish that at all. … And I think, for me, some of the things that are said about me I’m sure are more hurtful to my family and those closest to me than they are to me. So I feel badly about that. That hurts me.”
At the same time, she said, it has made her “tougher now than I was even when I came in.”
Senior staff for DeVos acknowledge that it will be Title IX that defines her term. Even so, she said she’s hopeful that her concern for students in grade school is part of her history. “My focus and my passion has been around trying to help students, kids,” she said. “It has been mostly on K-12-aged kids and trying to ensure that all kids have the kinds of opportunities that my husband and I were able to offer our kids.”
DeVos hasn’t committed to serving a second term should Trump be reelected. And she said she’s unsure what she’ll do next. She allowed that down the line, she could find herself running for office.
“I never sought this office and never thought about being in a federal role,” she said. “So, I never say never to something.”
Eddie Scarry is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
