By Jackie Gharapour Wernz, ECR Solutions PLLC

I’m glad the country is talking about sexual misconduct on campus, but I’m worried we’re ignoring the questions that matter most.

Key Takeaways:

• The Cornell case has sparked considerable debate about the underlying facts, who we should believe, and whether law enforcement and Cornell fulfilled their roles properly.
• Those are all fair questions, but the Cornell case highlights a much bigger problem in the Title IX space that is getting far less attention. Our society asks schools, colleges, and universities to take on enormous responsibility for addressing serious sexual misconduct because law enforcement rarely prosecutes campus assault cases.
• Yet schools were never intended to replace law enforcement; indeed, there are many reasons they cannot. Add to that that many Title IX offices operate on limited budgets, lacking the resources to investigate and adjudicate or to adequately educate students to help mitigate the risk of these situations, and you have a perfect storm for incidents like the one that led to this case.
• And since the Cornell incident occurred in 2023, the Federal government has obliterated the Office for Civil Rights and focused almost all of its Title IX attention on hot-button political issues like gender identity and DEI. Without meaningful administrative enforcement risks, many educational institutions have reasonably shifted their focus away from Title IX sexual harassment.
• Unless we ensure that educational institutions have the resources they need to do Title IX sexual assault work well, cases like Cornell will unfortunately continue to happen.

 

Over the past week, people—including some I haven’t heard from in months or even years—have messaged me with some version of the same question: “Is this what you do?!” They’re referring to the Cornell sexual assault case, which recently exploded on the sceneafter a former undergraduate student filed a civil lawsuitalleging that she was raped in a fraternity house by seven male students.

I do spend my days helping schools, colleges, and universities get civil rights responses like the one in this case right, hopefully the first time around. And in the past week, I’ve often felt like what I expect doctors and nurses feel when they watch TV shows about hospitals. So many things being said about the work we do are just so wrong—so unrealistic.

I discussed several of these issues, including the different definitions and standards used in the educational process and law enforcement processes, the different roles allegations and evidence play in Title IX processes, and why a school might impose essays as one of several sanctions against students found to have engaged in sexual misconduct, with Dan Schorr on his Title IX and Civil Rights Podcast this week. You can listen to it on Spotify here.

But the issue I most wish we would pay more attention to in this discussion is that we have placed an extraordinary amount of responsibility for addressing sexual misconduct in schools, colleges, and universities, but we pay much too little attention to what resources those institutions devote to fulfilling that responsibility.

Why Schools Carry the Load

The criminal justice system often does not address sexual misconduct cases, primarily because criminal processes typically grant prosecutors broad discretionto decide whether to file charges or decline prosecution. That discretion does not exist in a Title IX process. If a formal complaint alleges sufficient facts that, if substantiated, would establish a violation of a school’s Title IX policy, the institution must investigate and adjudicate the case unless it dismisses it or resolves it through an informal process. That means schools, colleges, and universities are often the only ones addressing complaints of these types of serious, potentially criminal conduct.

But Title IX offices were never intended to take the place of law enforcement. Their investigators are not police detectives. They don’t have search warrants, toxicology labs, or subpoena power to compel the participation of witnesses. Their decision-makers are not juries or judges. They are intended to implement educational consequences, not criminal ones. In a perfect world, educational institutions could rely at least in part on the fact-finding of the criminal justice system to fulfill their separate Title IX responsibilities. But in our real world, they very often cannot.

As a result, once the institutional process is complete, it’s common for one or both parties to be dissatisfied. Complainants are often frustrated when an investigation does not substantiate the allegations because of the limitations discussed above. Respondents found responsible for conduct often argue that they were unfairly branded as a sexual assailant through a process lacking the protections of a criminal process. And that’s when things go well.

Limited Resources, Limited Oversight

Why might things not go well at an institution? [Note: I’m not suggesting they did not go well in this case. Frankly, the fact that Cornell has a 1000 page record and expelled two students suggests they completed a very thorough process]

At the same time that we ask educational institutions to carry the burden for campus sexual assault, we do not require any particular level of staffing and funding for Title IX offices. Title IX professionals who work for institutions are grossly underpaid compared to campus roles with similar expected skills, making it difficult for institutions to find and retain qualified individuals to do the work. Because of budget limitations, many institutions also rely on volunteer faculty and staff or professionals to handle casework, decisions, and appeals, even if their other institutional demands and lack of professional training and experience mean they are more likely to make mistakes. Training budgets are often limited, meaning the professionals in these roles often lack the professional development needed to do these difficult jobs well.

Title IX offices also rarely have the authority and funding to conduct the kind of educational outreach to students that this case shows is so critically important. Whatever ultimately proves true about the disputed allegations in this case, alcohol, drugs, sex, and Greek culture are all part of the story being told. Students need serious, repeated education about consent, incapacitation, alcohol, drugs, bystander intervention, and sexual decision-making, especially students participating in higher-risk environments like fraternities, sororities, and athletics. Instead, they often get a one-time, thirty-minute online module they click through once during orientation and quickly forget.

Mistakes also happen because even the things Title IX requires of schools are minimally enforced. The institution historically most likely to enforce Title IX—the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights—is barely enforcing Title IX in cases of sexual misconduct anymore. OCR has highlighted some recent enforcement action involving sexual misconduct, but anyone watching the Department’s public Title IX activity in 2025 and 2026 knows that the vast majority of its Title IX attention is on hot-button political issues like gender identity and the definition of sex. Even the Department’s September announcement formally restoring the 2020 Title IX regulations—which set forth the rules for the Title IX sexual misconduct process in schools—focused almost entirely on gender identity issues. Even if you don’t follow Title IX, ask yourself, how many political ads have you seen or heard during this midterm focused on “they/them” or DEI? Compare that to how many you’ve heard focused on making campus sexual assault less of a risk for students.

All of this matters because federal enforcement shapes institutional behavior. When schools believe meaningful oversight is likely, they have an added incentive to review policies, audit practices, address concerns before they become problems, invest in training, and adequately resource the people responsible for the work. When that oversight fades from view, an important source of pressure to make those investments fades with it.

Whatever one’s views on transgender issues and DEI, they are not the part of Title IX that the Cornell case suggests the world wants to be focused on. Until we have urgency at the Federal level around whether schools are equipped to do Title IX sexual assault work well, cases like Cornell will unfortunately continue to happen. And yet we have seen movement in the exact opposite direction in the past two years.

A Missed Opportunity

If the only questions we are asking regarding the Cornell case are who we believe, whether we think the police, district attorney, or Cornell reached the right result, or whether the criminal laws should be changed, we will have missed an opportunity to make changes that might have much more of an impact on Title IX processes.

The better conversation is bigger and harder. Until we grapple with questions like why we are asking colleges to bear so much responsibility for campus sexual violence and, if we are going to ask them to do so, why we are allowing it to happen without the resources we know they need to succeed, we will continue to see failures.

None of these questions are as satisfying as choosing a villain from a headline. But for those who want to avoid seeing cases like the Cornell case in the news again, they are much more important than many of the ones we are asking.