As I began discussing in my previous post, Project 2025 will have a damaging impact on individuals’ access to higher education. This has been a long standing goal of conservatives, as Fabiola Cineas points out at Vox. The goal is to limit access to universities and to return them, in many ways, to places that will, as Lauren Lassabe Shepherd mentions when speaking with Cineas and describing the history of Harvard, institutions “to train white men, usually second, third, fourth sons, and sometimes first sons, for the ministry, sometimes for medicine, sometimes for law, and also for public service.” This move dismantles advances made over the past century in access to higher education.

Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance, himself a Yale Law School graduate, delivered a speech entitled “The Universities are the Enemy” to the 2021 National Conservatism Conference. In that speech, he called universities “hostile institutions” where professors “teach that America is an evil, racist nation” to students who will “bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools.” He railed that universities limited free speech and expression while attacking free speech and expression. He concluded his speech by quoting Richard Nixon who said, “Professors are the enemy “ as Vance vowed to “aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Presidential nominee Donald Trump, as Katherine Knott points out, “has already vowed to “fire” accreditors and reclaim colleges from the “radical left,” called for the creation of a free national online university paid for by taxes on wealthy colleges, threatened to deport campus protesters and backed extending green cards to college graduates” Knott notes, as well, that experts think “rolling back policies put in place by the Biden Administration and overhauling accreditation to allow alternative providers of college credentials to access federal financial aid” sit at the top of the list of policies Trump would enact if reelected. I discussed the latter in my previous post, and today I want to look some at the former, specifically the impact on Title IX and other programs.

Project 2025 begins its attacks on Title IX by pushing the administration to define “‘sex’ under Title IX to mean only biological sex recognized at birth.” Rhetorically, even this formulation of “recognized at birth” places the gender of individual in the hands of someone outside of themselves, a doctor or parental figure. We see this specifically with individuals who are “intersex,” as Amnesty International points out. So, even from their push to have “sex” defined in this manner, they underscore the reality of gender and sexuality by noting that someone has to “label” a child based on a male/female binary when the child enters the world. Burke goes on to reference the Bostock (2020) decision, claiming that by “redefining ‘sex’ to ‘sexual orientation and gender identity’” the Biden Administration’s updates to Title IX misrepresent the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock which ruled, as Neal Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion, “An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex. Sex plays a necessary and undisguisable role in the decision, exactly what Title VII forbids.. Burke and Project 2025 claim that this decision merely covers Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and should not get extended to Title IX.

According to Project 2025, the “misrepresentation of the Bostock decision “threatens the American system of federalism, removes important due process protections for students in higher education, and puts girls and women in danger of physical harm.” Project 2025 seeks to reinstate the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulations which erected barriers that hindered sexual assault survivors from coming forward by, in part, having individuals work through a 2,033 page document compared to 53 pages under Obama. Project 2025 calls upon Trump’s Administration, when back in office, to “signal its intent to enter the rulemaking process to restore the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulation, with the additional insistence that ‘sex’ is properly understood as a fixed biological fact.” Again, the language that Project 2025 uses is important to note. The use of ”fixed” goes against the previous use of “recognized” in the earlier statement. Here, “fixed” still carries with it the action of someone other than the individual, but it also presents gender as set in stone and non-fluid.

Along with re-erecting barriers to survivors coming forward, the reinstating of the Trump Administration’s Title IX rules would harm LGBTQ+ students because it would force individuals to use binaries. Democracy Forward notes that this move would target individuals whose “gender identity does not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.” The Biden Administration rescinded the Trump Administration’s Title IX regulations and expanded them to protect LGBTQ+ individuals. As the DOE press release states, “the [final] rule protects against discrimination based on sex stereotypes, sexual orientation, gender identity, and sex characteristics.” However, Project 2025 seeks to take these protections away, leaving LGBTQ+ students at risk. We know that LGBTQ+ students face harassment and bullying at school, and since the spate of anti-LGBTQ+ laws across the country have increased, so have hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals in educational settings. In seeking to remove protections for LGBTQ+ individuals in Title IX, Project 2025 seeks to open pathways for more “legalized” targeting of individuals by denying them due process through Title IX protections.

This regressive position also calls upon the DOE to remove the “list fo shame” from its website. This list, as Project 2025 writes, arose during the Obama Administration when it “published on the Department of Education’s website a list of colleges that had applied for [religious] exemption” through the Office of Civil Rights in the DOE “from the strictures of Title IX.” For exemption, kids have to provide the religious affiliation and tenets of the organization along with the regulation that conflicts with those tenets. Since 2009, over 100 institutions have received Title IX waivers. The Pregnant Scholar has a list of institutions with religious exemptions. The list includes the institution’s request and the decision. As well, the Pregnant Scholar notes that in light of the new Title IX regulations “many campuses will be re-evaluating their policies in light of the new regulations, and some may be considering opting out entirely.”

Back in 2015, Campus Pride shared the list and Shane Windmeyer, the Executive Director of Campus Pride, stated, “Families and young people deserve to know that this list of schools is not loving, welcoming, safe spaces to live, learn and grow — and taxpayers should definitely not have to pay for a private college to openly discriminate against anyone.” By removing this list from the DOE website, Project 2025 lays the groundwork for LGBTQ+ individuals to face more discrimination without the ability for legal recourse. While they claim to protect “girls and women,” they seek to discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals by denying them access to legal recourse and access to information of institutions of higher learning that will not provide them with any protections.

This is not everything that Project 2025 recommends for Title IX. If you want to see those, I suggest reading pages 332–336 in Mandate for Leadership. In upcoming posts, I will finish my discussion of Project 2025’s impact on higher education and look at other agencies and policies it proposes. Until then, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below, and make sure to follow me on Twitter at @silaslapham.