April ‘Dear Colleague Letter’ Was 2011′s Biggest FIRE Fight

Article here. Excerpt:

'Looking back at the year just ending, it’s extraordinarily easy to identify FIRE’s biggest fight of 2011: the dramatic new regulations announced by the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in its April 4 “Dear Colleague Letter.”

In my five years here at FIRE, I can’t remember it ever being this easy to select a topic for my end-of-year review. Simply put, FIRE’s legal work has been dominated this year by OCR’s letter: analyzing OCR’s new requirements of every college and university that accepts federal funding (read: virtually all of them); crafting and publicizing our response and concerns; answering critics of our defense of student rights; tracking the importation of the worst of OCR’s new regulations into proposed federal legislation; documenting the impact OCR’s letter has already had on individual students and schools nationwide; and more.'