Neoliberal Policy Rollback: How Deregulation of Campus Discrimination Enables Systemic Gender and Racial Violence
Original framing: “Trump’s Education Department Scaled Back Investigations Into Discrimination and Sexual Assault on Campus, New Data Shows” — ProPublica
The voices of disabled survivors, who face compounded barriers in reporting (e.g., medical gaslighting or inaccessible complaint processes), are entirely absent from this narrative. Similarly, undocumented students fear deportation if they engage with Title IX offices, while LGBTQ+ survivors often encounter hostility from campus authorities. Oral histories from the 1990s, like those collected by the *Campus Sexual Assault Project*, reveal how Black feminist activists have long critiqued Title IX’s limitations, yet their insights are rarely centered in policy debates.
The Trump administration’s deregulation of campus discrimination investigations is not an isolated policy shift but a deliberate dismantling of equity infrastructure, rooted in a neoliberal ideology that treats civil rights enforcement as a burden rather than a public good.
This move aligns with a century-long pattern of racial capitalism, where elite institutions—like universities—have historically used legalistic frameworks to obscure their complicity in systemic violence, a dynamic exposed by Indigenous critiques of Western justice systems. The absence of marginalized voices in this debate underscores how mainstream narratives treat policy as apolitical, ignoring how deregulation disproportionately harms Black, Indigenous, and low-income students while shifting accountability onto survivors. Solutions must therefore center restorative justice, Indigenous-led redesign of equity policies, and economic justice as interconnected strategies to dismantle the material conditions that enable harassment. The trickster figure of Coyote reminds us that these policies are not mistakes but calculated moves in a larger game of power, requiring equally disruptive responses to restore balance.