‘The University’s unlawful discrimination has continued despite my repeated and ongoing correspondence with both OCR and University officials over the last five years,’ civil rights activist says
A federal civil rights complaint against the University of St. Thomas has remained pending for almost six years now with the Department of Education.
Mark Perry first filed the complaint in Dec. 2018 and the Dept. of Ed.’s Office for Civil Rights formally opened an investigation in Nov. 2019. Yet, the Minnesota university once again held its “Science, Technology, & Engineering Preview Summer” for “girls who are currently in 6th, 7th or 8th grade” last week.
“Participants engineer, make, connect with mentors, explore the engineering labs, and enjoy life on campus,” according to a description for the School of Engineering event. “Girls will have the opportunity to make new friends and learn from college students and teachers about engineering.”
The Office for Civil Rights is part of the U.S. Department of Education. The complaint appears on the office’s publicly available list of pending cases.
Perry, a retired University of Michigan professor who is now a full-time civil rights activist, criticized the delay.
This year, the university “will once again violate its legal obligation to enforce Title IX by offering the single-sex, girl-only STEPS program,” Perry wrote in an email to the Dept. of Ed. and the University of St. Thomas. He shared a copy with The Fix.
“The University’s unlawful discrimination has continued despite my repeated and ongoing correspondence with both OCR and University officials over the last five years,” he wrote.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex-based discrimination, such as offering an event or program for one sex and not the other.
In emailed comments to The Fix, Perry explained that when the Office for Civil Rights fails to promptly complete investigations, it “enables schools to continue to violate federal civil rights laws.”
Moreover, Perry, who says he has filed over 1,000 civil rights in his career, thinks the case against the Catholic university should be easy to resolve, describing his complaint as a “single, straightforward, uncomplicated allegation of sex discrimination with overwhelming, incontrovertible evidence on the university’s website.”
Both the office and the university are at fault, according to Perry: “A federal investigation of a single allegation of illegal sex discrimination should realistically be concluded by OCR in a year or less, and there is no reason it should take nearly six years.”
“The only explanation for a six-year federal civil rights investigation is gross incompetence” on and the university’s “stubborn refusal to comply with its legal mandate to actively enforce Title IX.”
The Fix emailed the university’s media relations team and the School of Engineering twice in the last week, asking whether the university agrees with the complaint’s characterization and if so, how they justify limiting the scope of the program in a way seemingly in violation of federal law. Neither has responded to the inquiries.
The Fix also requested an update from the Office for Civil Rights on June 23 and 24 as well as the office’s Denver branch on June 27. Neither have responded in the past week.
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IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: Secretary of Education Linda McMahon speaks at a conference; Department of Education/Flickr. Photo has been cropped.