|
 |
Education Dive
These lawsuits could change the stakes for higher ed
We’re keeping track of high-profile legal cases that have important implications for colleges and universities.
By Natalie Schwartz
The future of higher education may be decided in the courtroom. New
lawsuits — some of which could reach the Supreme Court — are poised to
fundamentally reshape higher education by challenging everything from
how colleges investigate sexual misconduct to whether they’re doing
enough to protect students on campus.
“There’s no question that higher education is now in a litigation
frenzy,” said Peter Lake, a law professor at Stetson University. “We’re
facing legal accountability that’s almost unprecedented.”
Complicating the picture is the top court’s composition. Last year,
Justice Brett Kavanaugh cemented the bench’s conservative majority by
replacing former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who was considered a swing
vote. It’s difficult to predict where each justice will land on key
issues, but higher education leaders should brace for change.
Below, we’re keeping tabs on high-profile cases that could have implications for the sector.
Admissions: Kawika Smith, et al. v. University of California System
What you need to know:
Several advocacy groups sued the University of California System late
last year, arguing that its use of the SAT and ACT as an admissions
requirement discriminates against the state’s “least privileged
students,” including those from low-income families and from
underrepresented racial groups.
They’re asking the system to stop requiring applicants to submit
standardized test scores and factoring them into admissions decisions,
unless they can do so in a “rigorous and meaningful, transparent,
nondiscriminatory, and non-stigmatizing manner.”
The lawsuit comes as the movement for colleges to go test-optional is
gaining traction. More than 1,000 four-year institutions don’t ask for
SAT or ACT scores, with at least 45 schools dropping the requirement
last year.
The latest:
The groups are seeking a jury trial on the matter. ACT CEO Marten
Roorda urged the U of California’s board of regents to keep the
system’s standardized testing requirement in a January letter,
contending that its removal would harm students and limit colleges’
ability to objectively consider applicants.
Affirmative action: Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College
What you need to know:
A federal judge upheld Harvard University’s use of affirmative action
in admissions, arguing in a 130-page ruling filed in late September
that its race-conscious policies were “necessary and narrowly tailored”
to create a diverse student body.
However, the judge, Allison Burroughs, acknowledged that Harvard’s
admissions policies weren’t perfect and that officials may benefit from
implicit bias training.
The ruling dealt a blow to Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), the
anti-affirmative action group that brought the lawsuit against
Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies in 2014. SFFA alleged
Harvard’s admissions officers hold Asian American applicants to a
higher standard than other students.
Although there’s evidence to back up those claims, some argue the
architect of the lawsuit, SFFA President Edward Blum, is using Asian
American students to achieve his long-running goal of ending
affirmative action in all corners of the U.S.
The group appealed, and if they are successful, the case may eventually
reach the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority has affirmative
action supporters wary. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, for
example, argued in a 2016 dissent that affirmative action policies have
the potential to discriminate against Asian Americans.
The group has similar lawsuits pending against the University of Texas
at Austin and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The latest:
The case is far from over. SFFA has appealed the ruling. If it is
successful, the case will go onto the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
First Circuit.
Affirmative action: Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina
What you need to know:
The group behind the lawsuit against Harvard University’s use of
affirmative action is also suing the University of North Carolina
System, its leaders and the Chapel Hill campus, alleging its admissions
process is unfair to white and Asian American students and favorable to
black and Hispanic students.
SFFA’s lawyers filed court documents earlier this year that allege
racial preferences accounted for the admission of almost 25% of
in-state Hispanic applicants and 42% of in-state black applicants. The
university denied those claims.
The allegations that UNC gives black and Hispanic students preferential
treatment is similar to previous challenges to affirmative action. In
that way, the lawsuit takes a different legal approach than the case
against Harvard, The New York Times reported. That may give it another
shot at reaching the Supreme Court.
The latest:
A trial over the matter has been rescheduled from June 8 to May 11, 2020.
Free speech: Gibson’s Bakery v. Oberlin
What you need to know:
After an Oberlin College student accused a local bakery of racial
profiling, fellow students, faculty and staff at the college rallied in
his support and launched protests. The bakery responded by suing the
college for libel and slander.
In June, the jury delivered a verdict in favor of the bakery, awarding
it $44 million in damages that has since been lowered to $31.6 million.
In early October, Oberlin’s board of trustees voted to appeal the
verdict.
“The decision is grounded in the board’s fiduciary responsibility to
the College’s long-term financial health,” said the board’s chair,
Chris Canavan, in a statement. He added that the verdict could be a
threat to First Amendment rights across college campuses. Oberlin has
assembled a team of high-profile First Amendment and appellate
attorneys to contest the case.
Moreover, some legal scholars say the jury’s decision could scare
colleges into clamping down on students’ speech out of fear of being
held responsible for the consequences.
The latest:
In late October, Gibson’s Bakery filed a cross-appeal to restore the judgment to $44 million.
Free speech: Speech First v. Wendy Wintersteen, et al.
What you need to know:
Speech First, a free speech advocacy group that has now sued several
universities, filed a lawsuit against leaders of Iowa State University
in January. The organization contends that they “have created a series
of rules and regulations designed to restrain, deter, suppress, and
punish speech” about political and social issues.
The lawsuit contends that the university prohibits students from
writing messages on campus sidewalks in chalk, and from using their
university emails from communicating about campaigns and ballot in
violation of their First Amendment rights.
It also takes issue with the college’s administrative team that
responds to bias incidents, a term Speech First argues has too broad of
a definition and includes some forms of protected speech.
The group has had some success with this argument before. As part of a
settlement with Speech First, the University of Michigan agreed in
October to not restart its bias response team and to retain its new
system, which does not conduct disciplinary action, MLive reported.
The latest:
Speech First is asking a judge to declare the policies as
unconstitutional and to order the university to stop enforcing them
while the lawsuit plays out.
Greek life: Anna McNeil v. Yale University
What you need to know:
Earlier this year, three undergraduate women at Yale University filed a
class-action lawsuit against the institution and its fraternities,
alleging that the latter controls the campus social scene in a biased
manner against women and nonbinary students and fosters a culture where
sexual harassment runs rampant.
Yale is complicit, they argued, because it doesn’t adequately monitor
or punish the fraternities for such behavior. The plaintiffs, who are
members of a campus gender equity group called Engender, contended that
these issues amount to a Title IX violation because women and nonbinary
students don’t have access to organizations with the same level of
benefits — including student housing, alumni networks and “social
clout” — as fraternities, which only admit men.
“Simply put, fraternities elevate men to social gatekeepers and
relegate women and non-binary students to sexual objects,” they wrote
in their complaint.
Yale pushed back against the plaintiff’s claims in its motion to
dismiss the case, arguing that it has no control over fraternity
membership policies and that it has responded to harassment and assault
allegations under its purview.
The latest:
A federal judge threw out most of the claims in the case, saying that
the membership policies of fraternities and sororities are beyond Title
IX’s scope. He also agreed that Yale did not have control over the
fraternity parties where plaintiffs allege they experienced
discrimination and harrassment.
However, the judge is letting part of the case move forward. One
plaintiff alleges that when she told her first-year counselor that she
was sexually assaulted, the counselor “shrugged off” the complaint and
didn’t report the misconduct. “[T]hese factual allegations are
sufficient to support a viable Title IX claim,” the judge ruled.
Greek life: Gruver v. State of Louisiana through the Board of Supervisors of Louisiana State University, et al.
What you need to know:
A lawsuit filed in 2018 over a student’s death could impact how
colleges and universities are expected to handle complaints of hazing.
In 2017, an 18-year-old Louisiana State University freshman died from
alcohol poisoning after he was forced to drink lethal amounts during a
hazing ritual.
His parents are seeking $25 million in damages, alleging the university
didn’t do enough to crack down on fraternities that were hazing, even
though most had risk-management violations leading up to their son’s
death.
Meanwhile, the lawsuit contends, the university “aggressively” pursued
allegations of hazing while looking the other way when confronted with
similar allegations against fraternities. That amounts to a violation
of Title IX, the lawsuit contends, because it minimizes “the hazing of
males as ‘boys being boys’ engaging in masculine rites of passage.”
The latest:
The university has appealed the judge’s decision to reject its motion
to dismiss the case. Meanwhile, the student’s parents have settled with
Phi Delta Theta and several defendants who were members of the
fraternity at the time of their son’s death.
Greek life: Sigma Alpha Epsilon, et al. v. Harvard University
What you need to know:
A lawsuit over single-gender student clubs could have big implications for the future of Greek organizations on campus.
In 2016, Harvard rolled out a policy meant to deter students from
joining exclusively male “final clubs” by barring members of all
unrecognized single-gender groups — including fraternities and
sororities — from holding campus leadership positions and receiving
some fellowships. Several Greek organizations have since alleged in
lawsuits that the policy violates gender-discrimination laws and their
right to free association.
The latest:
Harvard filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the policy
is gender-neutral and therefore does not discriminate based on sex.
In August, the judge presiding over the case partially rejected that
motion, writing that such a policy is “no less discriminatory or
motivated by sex simply because it applies equally to members of both
sexes.” He also dismissed some of the Greek organizations from the case
because they don’t have members enrolled in Harvard.
Immigration: Guilford College v. Nielsen
What you need to know:
More than 60 colleges threw support behind a lawsuit against a Trump
administration policy that changed how “unlawful presence” is
calculated for nonimmigrant visa-holders, making it easier to impose
reentry bans on international students and scholars.
In February, a federal judge sided with those institutions, ruling that
the policy didn’t go through the required rulemaking process and that
it conflicted with current law.
The order is a victory for the colleges, which said the policy created
“significant and destructive uncertainty” for visa programs and
hampered their ability to recruit international students.
The latest:
More legal battles may be coming. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration
Services plans to propose formal regulations that would determine how
visa-holding students incur unlawful presence.
Immigration: Trump v. NAACP; McAleenan v. Vidal; Department of Homeland Security v. Regents of the University of California
What you need to know:
In 2017, the Trump administration attempted to phase out the Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which lets nearly 700,000
immigrants who were illegally brought to the U.S. as children study and
work in two-year blocks. Officials argue the program was unlawful
because it was set up through executive order, but a handful of lower
courts have blocked the administration’s attempts to end the program,
sending the case to the Supreme Court.
In September, the University of California System, the first college to
sue the government over DACA, filed a brief arguing that the Trump
administration didn’t have a valid reason for ending the program. The
system was joined in early October by more than 180 colleges and 40
higher education associations that also defended the program in
separate briefs.
At issue isn’t whether the Trump administration had the legal authority
to end the program but rather if it took the right steps to do so. The
Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments over the case in
mid-November, and they are expected to reach a decision on the future
of the program by mid-2020.
Some 124,000 DACA recipients were enrolled in college as of September 2017, the Migration Policy Institute reported.
If DACA is revoked, those students would no longer be shielded from
deportation and could lose access to higher education. That’s because
several states bar undocumented students without DACA protections from
enrolling or paying in-state tuition rates, according to the Center for
American Progress.
The latest:
The Supreme Court justices appeared divided over the case during oral
arguments, CNN reported. While the four liberal members suggested the
Trump administration didn’t take the appropriate steps to end the
program, the conservative justices seemed more receptive to the
government’s argument that it had.
Title IX: John Doe v. Michigan State University
What you need to know:
A suspended Michigan State University student accused of sexual assault
filed a first-of-its-kind class-action lawsuit against the school
alleging its policies did not provide due process. If the lawsuit
succeeds, it could overturn en masse universities’ sanctions against
accused students who didn’t have a live hearing or an opportunity for
cross-examination.
Another ruling in a similar case last year cleared the way for a
class-action lawsuit. In that case, a judge ruled that a University of
Michigan student accused of sexual assault had the right to a live
hearing in which he or an attorney could question his accuser, forcing
the college to revise its Title IX policies.
The latest:
The court must certify the case before it proceeds as a class-action
lawsuit. The university has asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit.
Title IX: John Doe v. University of California
What you need to know:
In August, two former U of California System students accused of sexual
misconduct filed a class-action lawsuit alleging the system’s Title IX
policies are unfair. They were denied their due process rights, they
contend, because they didn’t have an opportunity to cross-examine their
witnesses in front of a neutral factfinder.
The lawsuit came eight months after a California appeals court ruled
that the University of Southern California must let students accused of
sexual misconduct question their accusers and other witnesses during a
hearing in front of a neutral factfinder, which could not be the Title
IX investigator.
In the wake of the decision, the U of California and other institutions
in the state have revised their policies to meet the court’s
expectations. However, the lawsuit seeks to overturn sanctions against
hundreds of students found responsible for sexual misconduct under the
state system’s former Title IX policies.
The latest:
The lawsuit has yet to be class-action certified.
|
|
|
|
