Dear students, faculty, and staff,

I am writing as a follow-up to the announcement of the new Title IX regulations and to give you an update on our progress.

On May 6, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued new regulations mandating how colleges and universities address cases under Title IX, a federal statute that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity. The new regulations will become effective August 14.

In 2018, the department provided notice of proposed rulemaking on the new regulations—the first full rulemaking on Title IX since 1975 and the only Title IX rulemaking dedicated to sexual harassment. It totaled more than 2,000 pages and received more than 124,000 comments from the public.

While we closely followed the development of the proposed regulations, there were significant and meaningful changes to the final rule. We have worked over the past two months to evaluate the impact and identify decision points. To date, we have taken the following steps:

• Establishing a Title IX Implementation Team and reviewing resources provided by a cross section of professional and interest organizations in an effort to accurately evaluate the requirements
• Cohosting a meeting for all SEC Title IX coordinators and their respective general counsel’s offices
• Engaging our counterparts in the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine Action Collaborative
• Hosting four Office of Title IX lunch hours to field questions, concerns, and feedback from our campus community

During our four June lunch hours, the discussions included some across-the-board concerns that I would like to address:

• Faculty and staff mandatory reporting obligations will remain the same.
• We will still address sexual harassment occurring in our campus community that takes place inside and outside academic programs and activities, both on and off campus.
• Some aspects of how we apply Title IX will change to meet mandates under the new rule, but our fundamental principles will stay the same.

We have developed a summary of the Title IX regulations and a list of frequently asked questions, which I hope you will find useful.

I invite you to join us for a virtual town hall at noon on August 7 and hope you will encourage others to attend. We will present the final policy and provide a question-and-answer session.

As we continue through this process, I want to reiterate that the university remains committed to you and your safety and will continue to provide holistic support, reporting options, and coordinated prevention efforts. If you have additional questions or would like to talk further, please do not hesitate to reach out to me directly at ashleyblamey@utk.edu.

While there is still a great deal of work to do, I wanted to provide you with a report of our progress so far. I look forward to our continued work together. Thank you for your commitment to this important issue.

Respectfully,

Ashley Blamey
Title IX Coordinator