Harvard Law Fights Awful Ed Department Rules: Bravo, But No School Should Have To

Article here. Excerpt:

'One of the salient features of the Obama administration has been its willingness to toss aside the rule of law whenever getting a result that its zealous officials and supporting interest groups want collides with fundamental fairness. Over the last couple of years, that impulse has manifested itself in the brazen demands by the Department of Education that colleges and universities abide by its regulations concerning sexual harassment and assault.

The notion that America’s campuses are gripped by an epidemic of sexual assault and tolerate a “rape culture” has never had any basis in fact. It is, however, a meme popular with the feminist left – a hobgoblin they find useful. Efforts at boosting it, such as the infamous Rolling Stone article about an evidently fictitious rape at the University of Virginia have flopped disastrously.

Nevertheless, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has been on a national blitzkrieg to compel colleges and universities to follow its blatantly one-sided rules for the adjudication of sexual harassment and assault complaints.
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There is no constitutional authority for the federal government to give or lend money to students, but once it began doing so nobody stopped it. Now federal bureaucrats have the leverage to force schools to obey them. If they don’t, the flow of money will stop.

A very small number of institutions, wishing to keep their independence from federal bureaucrats, have done what they had to;they’ve rejected federal money completely.

Hillsdale College in Michigan is one of them. The school runs its own student loan system, described here by president Larry Arnn, thereby remaining free of the busybodies in Washington. (Running your own system for helping students finance their education has two other big advantages: it reminds administrators to minimize costs and also helps deter non-serious students.)'