Rather than turn to the liberal think tank, Brookings Institute, which has produced a fairly sound and fair review of the new Title IX regs, they turned to the louder, if less factual, source of the “survivor” activist organization, Know Your IX.

Jaslin Kaur, student engagement organizer for Know Your IX, a national advocacy group for survivors of sexual assault, agrees that community colleges often lack the resources and infrastructure to adequately respond to Title IX complaints — and that the new regulations won’t change that. She said community college students busy with work and childcare responsibilities and commuting back and forth to campus are less likely to know the protections that Title IX affords to them. The new regulations further reduce those protections, Kaur said.

The issue raised at Inside Higher Education is that community colleges, two-year schools, lack the money and infrastructure to comply with the new regs, although in its typical disingenuous non sequitur, that’s the least of the problems since the new regs will fail the students anyway.

“They’re mandating a different infrastructure for schools to get on board with, but the infrastructure itself is missing so much,” she said. “They see a federal mandate and they have to implement this … but there’s many ways that that’s a failure to the student body.”

For smaller, lesser-funded schools, the single investigator model pushed on them by the Lhamon Office of Civil Rights made it all easy-peasy.

The new regulations also require three separate officials to work on different aspects of a Title IX complaint — a coordinator to receive the report, an investigator to look into it and a decision maker to determine results and sanctions. The new regulations abolished the single investigator model that previously condensed these responsibilities in one role. This puts an extraordinary strain on community colleges with limited staffing,

One might expect that even small under-funded community colleges have at least three separate officials in their administration, although it’s less than accurate that the people making the decision of guilt need to be officials, or that the investigator needs to be a school official. Even the coordinator can have a day job, like registrar. But still, there will be some wear and tear on the mechanics of operating a community college and complying with the regulatory framework for Title IX sex tribunals.

Even though Portland is the largest community college in the state, with 34,331 students enrolled in 2019, Baldino said PCC only received “a couple” of sexual misconduct complaints each year that would result in a live hearing process.

“The grievance process is going to take the largest investment of funds when we’re already low on funds,” Baldino said. “Because we don’t have dorms, because of the jurisdictional elements, we’re not going to have as many cases to get there. We’re going to have to spend a lot of money to build out a system that won’t receive as many cases as a university.”

What’s meant by “build out a system” is unclear. They don’t need to construct a wood-paneled courtroom. An unused classroom will do fine. They don’t need to take on full-time staff to do so, even if Harvard has 832 (I’m exaggerating. Slightly.) full-time staff in its Title IX machinery. It need not be any more expensive than it has to be, and if there was an actual thing that costs a disproportionate amount, you would think someone would be able to actually point to it, say it, write it down. Instead, it’s some ethereal expense, a great but unspecified burden.

But even if the expense is, indeed, a burden, the blame doesn’t fall on the new regs, but on the creation of the sex tribunal system in the first place. Having gotten into the business of sex-policing peer-to-peer interactions, you have to do it with some recognition of due process, the Constitution and the fact that the accused, too, are part of your student body. If the complaint is that doing it right might cost money you don’t have, the problem isn’t the new regs, but that you should never have become embroiled in the gender war in the first place.