She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX, with the following results:
Page 99 discusses how the people claiming rights under Title IX have deployed the law differently against different types of schools across the country. Title IX is the US civil rights law that bars education programs from discriminating “on the basis of sex,” and, as part of my effort to understand its changing use over time, I constructed an original dataset of all federal Title IX complaints filed against colleges and universities from 1994 to the near present. Page 99 presents one part of my analysis of these claims, specifically whether some schools have been targeted more than others relative to student enrollment. The finding that’s most central to my broader argument here is that our nation’s most selective schools have faced a disproportionately higher number of overall complaints, indicating that students at these schools are more likely to mobilize the law.Learn more about Unlawful Advances at the Princeton University Press website.
Page 99 provides only a partial sense of what the book is about. A reader might misconstrue the book as an exclusively quantitative analysis focused on tracing the evolution of Title IX at the national level, but I also draw on historical documents as well as interviews to explain how people on the ground shaped the law. The three empirical chapters preceding page 99 focus on these stories, explaining the emergence and diffusion of a new understanding of unlawful sex discrimination in education. I clarify how feminists at Cornell in the 1970s developed the political concept of “sexual harassment,” laying the foundation for and directly enabling the expansion of Title IX to encompass sexual harassment. Indeed, the feminists at Yale who initiated this shift in the law discovered “sexual harassment” through direct communication with the Cornell women. With this new language, the Yale women were able to invent a new interpretation of Title IX and then deploy it in a lawsuit against the university. One of the plaintiffs in this suit exposed feminists at Berkeley to the legal innovation, who went on to file the first federal complaint with the US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare alleging that a school had violated Title IX by mishandling sexual harassment. This complaint was crucial because it compelled the primary agency responsible for enforcing the law to recognize that sexual harassment can inhibit equal educational opportunity, setting new compliance standard for nearly all schools. The final chapter, where page 99 appears, traces the legacy of this transformation of Title IX through an analysis of key lawsuits, federal policies, and my original dataset of federal complaints. I show how the law’s prohibition against sexual harassment has grown more expansive—barring not just faculty-student incidents but also student-on-student incidents, for example—and how the specialized sexual harassment response systems schools used to address this problem have grown more legalistic.
While still an incomplete snapshot, page 99 does illustrate that the people’s power to transform law is unevenly distributed, which is key to the book’s argument. It was remarkable that young women at Yale and Berkeley were able to effect such lasting shifts in the law, university administration, and campus culture. But these weren’t any students; they were students at some of our nation’s most prestigious universities. Their actions continue to shape life on campus today.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
