Kansas Board of Regents

To improve consistency in how Kansas state universities respond to sexual violence and other Title IX issues, the Kansas Board of Regents is creating a working group on the subject.

The Regents voted this week to formalize the group, which is to meet quarterly and suggest strategies and solutions to university presidents.

“A working group made up of the university Title IX coordinators could elevate the importance of this topic and give coordinators an additional avenue for working together to discuss best and promising practices and to learn from each other on an ongoing basis,” the recommendation from the Regents Governance Committee said. “There is currently some cross-training and sharing of information, although it appears to have been sporadic.”

Regents chairman Shane Bangerter suggested the board consider expanding the working group to include university attorneys and discussion about how universities are handling litigation, to ensure universities have the best legal defense they can.

“We’ve seen an uptick in these kinds of lawsuits, and related lawsuits,” said Bangerter, who is an attorney. “It wouldn’t surprise me if that trend were to continue.”

Kansas University and Kansas State University both were sued this spring by women who said they were raped on campus or at fraternities but that school officials failed to properly address their reports.

Two women suing KU said they were sexually assaulted in on-campus apartments, and the parents of one also have sued KU under the Kansas Consumer Protection Act, claiming the university falsely depicted student housing as safe. Two women suing K-State said their rapes occurred in fraternity houses.

KU and K-State also are on a list of schools nationwide being investigated by the U.S. Department of Civil Rights Office for Civil Rights for the way they’ve handled Title IX complaints. There are four cases open at K-State and two at KU, according to the most recent list from the USDE.

Earlier this year the Regents created a “notice of litigation policy” spurred by another Title IX related court case.

In the case of Navid Yeasin v. KU — filed by a man KU expelled for harassing his ex-girlfriend, also a KU student, via Twitter — K-State filed a friend of the court brief opposing KU’s position. KU held that it did have jurisdiction to enforce Title IX in that case, while K-State said it did not.

“Having state universities disagree about the parameters of this federal law was unacceptable,” according to a Regents memo about the notice of litigation policy, which requires state universities to notify the board if they are suing or opposing another state university in court.

Title IX is the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education, and it requires universities to investigate and adjudicate cases of sexual harassment, sexual violence and intimate partner violence that create a hostile environment for a student on campus.