Today I’m sharing some comments I gave as a panelist for my local AAUP chapter at an event last week. This event was on the weaponization of Title VI. Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and is intended to address “discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin, in programs that receive federal funding.”

I share these comments because the weaponization of Title VI – which I write from the context of being someone with expertise in issues of Title IX and sexual harassment – is one of many ways faculty academic freedom is under threat. As a union organizer I talk to faculty every single day. Most of them – especially those who are international scholars, including those who are naturalized citizens – describe self-censoring, changing research trajectories, and watching what they say not only in public, but in faculty meetings and in the classroom. My colleagues are under attack for teaching about the history of sexuality, for being trans studies scholars, for studying the impacts of racism on health, and more. Vulnerability in how Title VI is executed started with claims against people who express solidarity with Palestine, but it doesn’t end there. Without universities addressing this problem our most vulnerable colleagues – which means many of you, your professors, or your kids’ professors, or your neighbors – are at risk of being doxxed, threatened, or losing their jobs.

I hope you’ll read my comments below so that you can be caught up on one of the big challenges professors are facing today as they try to uphold their values and educate the public.

My (lightly edited) comments from 6 May on Title VI versus Title IX

My argument:

Today I’ll be arguing that Title IX and Title VI are legalistic mechanisms that create a sense of action, give sensitive information to people in power, but in the end do nothing to resolve issues of sexual misconduct or race-based discrimination. What’s remarkable to me is how they each manage to do this in effectively opposite ways: with Title IX in creating an atmosphere of fear to report, and in Title VI creating an atmosphere of fear to be reported. Complainants in Title IX processes are often additionally victims of social and professional retaliation, professional and educational consequences, and institutional betrayal. Respondents in Title VI processes are often additionally victims of social media campaigns and doxxing, professional consequences, and institutional betrayal. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Why does Title IX matter to this conversation?

I’ll start by differentiating Title IX and Title VI. Title IX is the mechanism that is supposed to address discrimination based on sex. This is where we see supposedly equal opportunities for men and women athletes – the way most universities, including ours, get compliant without actually reducing their support of men’s basketball and football is to simply have more women’s sports than men’s sports. The rest of Title IX is intended to address sexual misconduct – this includes sexual harassment and assault but also pregnancy support.

There are multiple challenges with making Title IX effective. The first is that we are asking people to volunteer to share with a stranger truly terrible moments of their lives, in an environment that teaches them that alleged victims are seen as liars or overreactors. One of the biggest critiques of Title IX is around the idea of the false report – that Title IX can be and is abused in particular by vindictive women for whom something in their life didn’t go their way. However, multiple studies at this point have shown that the rate of false allegations is between two and six percent.

The other big challenge with Title IX is the element of mandatory reporting – and in many universities, including ours, mandatory reporters are defined very widely, placing all faculty, instructional staff, and more in this category. In order to follow the law, mandatory reporters are supposed to report all cases of sexual misconduct that they hear, regardless of whether the person disclosing wants to report, to Title IX. This instantly escalates what could be a productive conversation to help a person seek resources and support into a legalistic framework that says “if you tell me any more, I could get sued by not reporting.” Which then puts a person who has allegedly been harmed into the position of feeling bad if they are hesitant to report, compounding their already awful feelings.

Universities all over the country have tried to create practices to improve mandatory reporting, and they have not worked. When we compare the incidence of sexual misconduct disclosed in campus climate surveys to the number of reports to Title IX, we find a five to six percent reporting rate. This has not changed in thirty years, thirty years of intervention has not moved this percentage. This is largely, again, because of myths around false allegations as well as the very real threats of retaliation from the alleged perpetrator and institutional betrayal in how the investigation is experienced.

I wanted to just set that stage for how we understand Title IX and reporting processes to now discuss Title VI. Both of these reporting structures come from a good intent – Title IX to address sexual misconduct, Title VI to address race-based discrimination. So how have they failed victims so massively, and so differently?

Why doesn’t Title VI work either?

Many Title VI offices, including our own, emerged out of a complaint filed with the Office for Civil Rights alleging our campus has a hostile environment towards Jewish students. My understanding – and Rob please correct me here – is that we settled this complaint, and that part of the agreement included the creation of the Title VI office and reporting structure, as well as agreement to report those reports back to OCR. I believe this complaint was filed in 2024, the timing of which is quite relevant, and that it was settled that year, and that our Title VI office began in earnest in January 2025. Over the last year they’ve received 550 complaints, almost half of which arose from outside the university. My understanding is that a large portion of these charges have been around “shared ancestry” and antisemitism, which is consistent with the way these offices and reporting mechanisms are used nationwide.

What’s also notable here is that of the 550 complaints filed – and all require at least a preliminary investigation – none required further investigation nor lead to a finding against a respondent. This points to a few possibilities: a large number of spurious and/or false allegations, and/or a very high burden of proof.

First, on the potentially spurious and/or false allegations. Where Title IX investigations have been extensively researched and false allegations have been found to be rare, reflecting on the first year of UIUC’s Title VI office suggests that Title VI is being specifically weaponized against people who express pro-Palestinian sentiment, and that sentiment is being judged by complainants as being antisemitic. I will speak to a single report I have personally seen, because one of the ongoing problems of the Title VI office is that most of the people being alleged as antisemitic have never seen their reports, or they hear rumors they have been reported, but then are never actually communicated with or shown any of their materials by the Title VI office.

In this one report, a professor in a public setting shared their sense of grief for the ongoing Palestinian genocide in Gaza, connecting that struggle to broader struggles for autonomy and Land back among other Indigenous peoples. The report of this incident to the Title VI office shared that this statement was antisemitic because the professor did not also mention the killing of Israeli people on October 7^th, 2023. I do not think a reasonable person would find that not mentioning this event in this context constitutes antisemitism, nor do I think it should rise to the level of hostile environment. And of the people I know who have been indirectly told, but not shown, reports leveled at them, the reports are similar to this one. Dare to express any solidarity with Palestinians and get reported as antisemitic.

But here’s the other problem with this reporting mechanism, its weaponization against Palestinians and anyone who speaks in solidarity with Palestinians, and its high burden of proof: additional reports of race-based discrimination get lost in the mix. I also know of multiple reports made about the Illini Republicans Instagram post that was anti-immigrant, racist, and glorified the murder of Alex Pretti. This post, that many interpreted as threatening violence, was timed to appear shortly before a local anti-ICE rally, which likely led to fear and reduced numbers at the event. Yet this action did not rise to the level of “hostile environment.”

One of our colleagues has made multiple reports of Chief imagery on our campus, including custom Nike sneakers worn by one of our NCAA athletes in a televised event. You would think that our refusal to adopt the Kingfisher, our continued licensing of Chief imagery, and the national appearance of this imagery on one of our men’s basketball starters would be enough to constitute a hostile environment. But apparently that did not count either.

So we are looking at a process that is being used often by the same small number of people on campus, or by people with no affiliation to our campus encouraged to report through inflammatory social media posts, often taking professors’ words out of context, and those reports are claims of antisemitism. Much of the time the respondents are never even told that a report has been made against them. In the first case I shared, the professor only learned that a report was made against them when they were discussing with a staff member whether the university would comply with a McCarthyist mandate to share the names of respondents and complainants with Trump’s OCR. Recall of the 550 reports, none were found to create a hostile environment. But every respondent was going to have their names sent to the federal government and they were going to end up on a list. It was only because the Campus Faculty Association, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, and several other community, student, and labor organizations came together and submitted a letter demanding that the university find another way to comply that those names were not sent.

Many of you are probably familiar with Tema Okun’s work on white supremacy culture in organizations. I’d contend a lot of what we see in these reporting mechanisms and how they are experienced by their various victims is in line with their argument. In these processes we see power hoarding, including information hoarding among those with more power; fear of open conflict; mistakes are perceived as personal rather than structural; low trust; and, a presumption of incompetence imposed on workers outside of the inner circle of “higher ups.” Finally, one of the hallmarks of white supremacy organizational culture is that there exist feedback processes that just enable information collection & tracking of dissent without useful action.

I am speaking today in my capacity not only as a scholar of sexual harassment in academia but as co-president of the Campus Faculty Association, which is seeking to unionize right now. And to me, both of these mechanisms, however well-intentioned and even when staffed by caring people, show us that we cannot wait to be rescued by the university when it comes to our personal safety, our academic freedom, or really anything else. The only rational response at this point, to these reporting mechanisms, is to recognize they are functioning exactly as designed, and that design is not for us. We don’t need rescuing from these offices, though – we have the tools to rescue ourselves.