Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments of 1972 has turned out to be the pathway for federal bureaucrats to assert an astounding degree of control over nearly all American colleges and universities. It’s rather like a small cut that becomes infected with extremely dangerous bacteria, spreading rapidly throughout the body.

In today’s Pope Center article, economics professor William Anderson of Frostburg State University examines the history of Title IX. The original idea, he writes, was pretty benign. The motive behind the law was to prevent discrimination against women in higher ed, and he relates his own experience as an athlete on the University of Tennessee’s track team to support the idea that things really were unequal back in the early 70s.

But then we started to discover the usual unintended consequences from seemingly benign government intervention. First, schools found out that the way to avoid trouble with the feds over non-compliance was to drop men’s sports. That does nothing to help women, but satisfies the egalitarian impulses of the federal regulators.

Later, the feds seized upon the vague “subjected to discrimination” wording in the law to bring about a vast increase in their power to control what goes on in our higher ed system. That is why we now have schools bowing to federal dictates regarding how they treat students accused of any sexual impropriety, despite the fact that the federal rules are such an assault on due process that many law professors have denounced them. They have also brought about lawsuits from students wrongly expelled, but fighting such suits is apparently better than encountering the wrath of the Office for Civil Rights, as far as college leaders are concerned.

And now we’re looking at still more intervention from the Federal Nanny, since colleges are now being told to set up programs to deal with “potentially problematic conduct” by students in an effort at preventing any untoward sexual encounters.

Anderson concludes: “What started out as a law to give women more opportunities in higher education has morphed into a bureaucratic monster that destroys due process of law, sets students against each other, and encourages bureaucrats to search for new ways to expand their authority.” That sums things up very well.