Symbolic Compliance and Student Concerns: Legal Endogeneity and Title IX at American Colleges and Universities

Abstract

This article considers how American colleges and universities responded to rapid legal change around Title IX immediately following the 2011 release of the Office for Civil Rights’ Dear Colleague Letter. By analyzing the content of 250 campus sexual harassment policies, this article finds that contrary to the predictions of the employment discrimination literature, which suggests that the largest, most visible institutions in a field are the most likely to embed markers of symbolic compliance in their formal policies, small baccalaureate colleges are more likely to include references to the law in their formal documents than their research university peers do. To understand this intriguing finding, the article then analyzes 15 interviews with campus administrators at research universities and baccalaureate colleges to uncover the distinct logics of symbolic compliance and student concerns that differentially inform how actors at different kinds of institutions inhabit their roles and endogenously interpret new Title IX regulations in their formal policies and campus practices. In doing so, this article illuminates the ways in which processes of legal endogeneity differ across institution types within the broader field of higher education.