Title IX Grievance Procedure Rollback Leaves Colleges With Conflicting Compliance Obligations

The 2020 rule is back, and with it the live hearing that many campuses had just buried

On January 9, 2025, Judge Danny C. Reeves of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky vacated the Department of Education's 2024 Title IX regulations in their entirety. The decision in State of Tennessee v. Cardona left most American colleges with one operative federal rule: the May 2020 regulation adopted under former Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Title IX is 37 words. The interpretive wars are not. What changed in 2024 was the machinery around that sentence. The Department adopted a broader definition of sex discrimination. It added protections for pregnancy, for sexual orientation, for gender identity, and for related sex-based characteristics. And it eliminated the live hearing and cross-examination requirements that had been mandatory for colleges since 2020.

Those provisions are now gone at the federal level. The 2020 rule is not a compromise document. It prescribes a specific adjudication structure for postsecondary institutions, and it arrives with an enforcement letter that tells schools to fall in line.

On January 31, 2025, Acting Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) told the field in a Dear Colleague Letter that OCR would enforce the 2020 amendments. The practical consequences followed quickly. A college must now define sexual harassment the way the 2020 rule defines it: unwelcome conduct determined by a reasonable person to be so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively denies a person equal access to education. Sexual assault, dating violence, domestic violence, and stalking under the Clery Act remain covered categories, but the broader Title VII-style hostile environment test no longer controls campus grievance decisions.

For postsecondary institutions, the biggest change sits in the hearing room. The 2020 rule requires a live hearing when a complaint proceeds to formal resolution. Each party's adviser must be permitted to ask the other party and witnesses all relevant and follow-up questions, including questions that challenge credibility. If a party or witness refuses to submit to cross-examination, the decision-maker cannot rely on that person's statements. The single-investigator model favored by many colleges in 2024 is no longer sufficient at the federal level.

The procedural machinery is laid out in the Department's May 2020 final rule. It treats postsecondary and elementary-secondary institutions differently in one important respect: elementary and secondary schools may use an investigator-only process, while colleges must provide a live hearing with cross-examination. That distinction, easily lost in policy summaries, is exactly where the current conflict begins.

Many campuses spent 2024 revising their codes to match the previous administration's model. Some had already adopted single-investigator procedures under the 2024 framework. Others operated under state laws that had never required adversarial cross-examination. The January decision did not grandfather those policies. It made them noncompliant with the federal rule now being enforced.

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Then come the state obligations. California's affirmative consent standard, which requires voluntary and informed agreement to sexual activity, remains in force. New York's Article 129-B retains its own training requirements, reporting duties, procedural commands, and amnesty protections for colleges in that state. State statutes of this kind did not disappear when the federal rule reverted. A California campus cannot simply import the 2020 cross-examination script without checking whether state law limits direct questioning or imposes additional victim-protective measures.

Employment complaints add a second layer. Title VII's hostile environment standard, established by the Supreme Court in Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson, asks whether conduct is severe or pervasive enough to alter the terms of employment. The 2020 Title IX definition adds an objective "and objectively offensive" element and applies the "effectively denies equal access" phrase. A campus that handles an employee's harassment complaint under a Title IX-only process risks applying a standard narrower than the one federal employment law requires. Most prudent institutions run parallel procedures, but that means two investigative tracks, two training programs, a separate appeals route, and a compliance audit trail that grows more expensive every year.

The reset also revived a set of pressing details. The 2020 rule requires a nonconflicted decision-maker, a presumption that the respondent is not responsible, a written determination with findings and remedies, and an appeal procedure available to both parties. These elements are popular with due process advocates and deeply unpopular with survivor advocates. They are also administratively expensive. Some institutions in states that had blocked the 2024 rule before January never stopped using the 2020 framework; those campuses have an easier compliance path. Campuses that fully switched to the 2024 model now face rewriting costs, retraining burdens, the possibility of reopening old cases, and higher legal fees.

The earlier litigation adds confusion. Before the Kentucky ruling, federal courts had already blocked the 2024 rule in more than two dozen states. That meant institutions in different states were already living under different rules. The Kentucky decision made the 2020 rule national, but the accumulated state-level injunctions and appeals have not been cleanly unwound. Administrators are left sorting through old court orders, state statutes, OCR's enforcement posture, and their own recently revised policies. The vacated 2024 final rule had not been in effect long enough to produce a settled administrative practice. That is part of the problem.

For a Title IX coordinator, the path back to 2020 compliance is clearer than the surrounding legal ambiguity suggests. Four checks matter first.

• Audit the current policy against the 2020 rule's definitions and hearing requirements. Look for single-investigator language that should be removed or limited to elementary and secondary schools.
• Reconcile state law and collective bargaining agreements before adopting a model hearing script. The federal rule sets a floor, not a safe harbor.
• Retrain hearing officers, advisers, appeals officers, and investigators on cross-examination, relevance, the rule's limits, and the treatment of prior statements.
• Update the notice of nondiscrimination and the coordinator's contact information, because those are the first documents OCR requests in a compliance review.

None of those steps is novel. What has changed is the cost of ignoring them. The Department has made clear that it will use its enforcement tools, including referral for fund termination, against institutions that don't comply with the 2020 requirements.

On the athletics side, the same biological-sex interpretation drives much of the Department's current work, a subject we covered in our earlier report on Title IX and transgender rules in college sports. The grievance rollback and the athletics rollback are separate regulatory projects, but they share one premise, and a campus that treats them as unrelated will end up with inconsistent policies.

Here is the Department's Title IX resource page, which collects current guidance and enforcement materials.

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The compliance machinery has grown well beyond the 37 words that began it. That's not, on its own, a criticism. The law runs on details because a college discipline system that ignores due process or survivor protection has real consequences for real people.

The difficulty of the present moment is simpler than the commentary suggests. A regulation can be legally binding and administratively unworkable at the same time. The 2020 rule is binding again; whether it is workable on a campus that also follows California, New York, or Title VII rules will be tested one hearing at a time.