Published on: August 18, 2025
Part Four of the TNG@25 Anniversary Blog Series By: Brett A. Sokolow, J.D., Chair, TNG Consulting
Throughout the remainder of 2025, we’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary of TNG’s service to the education field, with blogs that commemorate our accomplishments and the people who have helped support our mission along the way. This fourth installment of our blog series highlights one of our most important accomplishments: enhancing the quality and accuracy of Title IX and other civil rights outcomes through training, investigation, and informed decision-making.
In a previous anniversary blog, I traced some of the history that has led to the prominence of Title IX in the education field today. Among the seminal developments was the publication by the Department of Education of its Title IX Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) on Campus Sexual Violence on April 4, 2011. I hailed the letter at the time as a vindication of what a lot of us working in this field had been advocating. On many fronts, the DCL had a groundbreaking and beneficial effect, marking a significant step forward. But, some people at the time also saw its potential to be regressive, and to set back both due process rights and the protections of those who were accused of sexual violence in school and college settings. I never agreed with the detractors who claimed that the DCL directed schools to ignore due process, but it is now clear that many in the field interpreted the letter this way, and that is one of the effects that it catalyzed. As soon as we saw the trend, we implemented corrective measures, and we’re still working diligently to help our field find the right balance between the rights of complainants and those of respondents. It’s a moving target, and even courts do not have consensus on what that right balance is.
Many people have critiqued ATIXA for failing to anticipate this due process problem, and I accept that critique. We were focused on establishing a field of Title IX professionals, and we weren’t paying close enough attention to the fact that we should also have been reaching out to student conduct professionals, who were often in different offices and engaged in turf battles with the newly burgeoning Title IX bureaucracies that were becoming popular on campuses. This was myopic of us, but it’s not that we didn’t consider due process to be important; instead, we viewed it as the responsibility of other departments that were not under the sphere of Title IX departments. That said, I am confident that had we intervened earlier, the result would not have been much different. Why? Now that we’re more than 14 years beyond the DCL’s publication, it is clear to me that the problem with campus and school resolutions of Title IX complaints is not rooted in a lack of due process, but rather in biased and inexperienced decision-making. We do have a problem, but to solve it, we need to identify the right cause.
Put more succinctly, if you loaded the Title IX resolution process with every due process protection afforded to criminal defendants, you’d still have bad outcomes, just like in the criminal justice system. To be clear, I am a proponent of due process. I may not agree that school and campus resolution processes need to be as formal as criminal proceedings, but more than basic due process protections are necessary to create a foundation for fair outcomes, and those protections need to adhere to all parties, not just respondents.
If you accept my premise that layering on due process won’t significantly improve the quality of outcomes, then you should join me in questioning what will, because we all share the goal of ensuring that we make the best possible, fairest decisions in all the complaints that cross our desks. Being a decision-maker in school and campus Title IX proceedings is not for the faint of heart. You need a unique skill set to do this well, including these ten qualities:
- Having strong analytical skills
- Being able to interpret and apply policy
- Being a subject matter expert (SME) on disparate treatment, hostile environments, sexual assault, stalking, dating/domestic violence, consent, incapacity, etc.
- Having strong hearing and pre-hearing management skills
- Being able to manage advisors
- Being able to make cogent relevance and evidentiary rulings
- Strong writing skills
- Strong questioning skills
- Understanding and being able to apply equity and due process
- Being trauma-informed in your approach
Finding people with such skill sets isn’t easy, so at ATIXA, we build them through rigorous training and certification processes. That’s one solution to the problem of low-quality outcomes. More importantly, we teach our decision-making trainees how to recognize, neutralize, and overcome various biases, to ensure the fairest possible decision-making. You know how many people refer to their jobs as “not being rocket science”? Well, decision-making isn’t rocket science, obviously, but in its own way, it is remarkably complex, technical, and easy to screw up, as seen from the unique combination of skills required in the list above. That’s why rocket scientists all say, at least we’re not Title IX decision-makers. Simply, better decision-makers make fairer decisions.
Another solution that we’ve innovated is The FAIR Center. Schools and colleges across the country have subscribed to TNG’s FAIR Center services, giving them access to TNG consultants as expert advisors, investigators, decision-makers, appeal decision-makers, advocates, and hearing facilitators. Each year, TNG consultants are involved in hundreds of campus complaint resolutions for our clients, and we stand by our outcomes and work product in litigation, OCR investigations, and other challenges to the fairness and accuracy of our work. So far, we’ve been upheld in every legal challenge we’ve faced, including the most due-process-friendly courts of appeals in our legal system. We remain committed to the goal of improving the quality of process outcomes by steadfastly applying evidence to policy, to determine if a violation has occurred.
Learn more about TNG’s FAIR Center and how wraparound services can improve your outcomes.