When the FBI learned of the extent to which James “Whitey” Bulger had subverted their Boston Field Office, their response was to clean it out, replacing absolutely everyone in it. Even those who hadn’t done anything wrong were given the choice of transferring to a different job with the Bureau or finding another line of work.
The FBI then staffed the Boston office with entirely new people, most new hires, none of whom had grown up in the South Boston housing projects with the Bulger brothers. Yes, Bulger’s gang was bribing the FBI, but the real problem was that the gangsters and FBI agents had grown up together and were all friends with each other.
A similar problem exists today with the people staffing the Field Offices of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the academic administrators whom OCR is supposed to regulate. In the midst of the litigation related to the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit against Harvard University, Harvard Law Professor Jeannie Suk Gersen identified a disturbing incident between the Boston Regional Office and the Harvard Admissions Department.
Writing about this in the New Yorker, Professor Suk Gersen explained that on November 30, 2012, Thomas Hibino—then an employee of the Boston office and who would go on to head it before retiring—was engaged in friendly email banter with William Fitzsimmons of the Harvard admissions office as they discussed their plans to meet for lunch.
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Hibino included an attachment that he described as “really hilarious,” adding that he wrote it for the amusement of both his and the Harvard admissions office. Written on stolen Harvard letterhead, it was purportedly written by a now-deceased member of Harvard’s admissions team. It downplayed what would have been an applicant’s truly significant accomplishments—including a Nobel Peace Prize—concluding that he was “just another AA CJer”—another Asian American applicant intending to study biology and become a doctor.
Fitzsimmons thought that his deceased colleague had written it, with Hibino of the OCR responding that no, it was he who had written it. While Professor Suk Gersen’s interest involved the trial judge’s refusal to permit this to become part of the public record, my interest is a bit broader—neither Hibino nor Fitzsimmons objected to the joke as being racist, which it clearly was.
More importantly, it shows the close relationships between the people working in these Field Offices and the universities they are supposed to be regulating. It’s the same problem that the Boston FBI Office had with relationships dating back thirty years to a shared childhood on the streets of South Boston.
In addition, OCR has moved many of its regulations from the widely-circulated Code of Federal Regulations to internal Field Office Manuals that the public does not have access to. I discovered this researching hate speech codes in the ’90s and could not understand the discrepancies between OCR policy as I was being taught it was and what I was reading in the Federal Register.
I called down to DC and was told that there were things not in the regs—they had moved everything controversial to the manuals of the regional field offices so that Congressional aides wouldn’t be able to find them. And hiding things from the Republicans isn’t really the way that the Federal bureaucracy is supposed to function.
Over the years since, we have had some good people serving as the Assistant Secretary in charge of OCR. Gerald Reynolds and Kennith Marcus come to immediate mind. Still, neither they nor reform-minded Secretaries such as Betsy DeVos have been able to accomplish much because the OCR decisions aren’t made in Washington, DC.
They are instead made in places like Boston, Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco, Denver, and New York City. And as best I can tell, the President can’t appoint anyone in these regional offices—they’re all in the union and pretty much free to do whatever they damn well please.
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And they do, in fact, do whatever they please, creating another problem—the regional offices aren’t even consistent with each other. OCR’s decisions regarding the Americans with Disabilities Act are a good example, with it being an open secret that ADA means one thing in Region 1, pretty much the exact opposite in Region 2, and then something closer to what Congress intended in the rest of the country.
The solution is for Secretary McMahon to adopt the model of the U.S. Department of Justice, where the headquarters in DC approves every major decision, and the regional offices are headed by a Presidential appointee.
She then needs to replace everyone in the regional offices. Offer them a lucrative early retirement package or a transfer to Washington where they can do something—just get them out of these offices because nothing is going to change with them there.
She needs to bring in new people, people who have legitimate academic credentials (i.e., terminal degrees) but who haven’t spent their lives in the academic or governmental bureaucracy—“no nonsense” people who will enforce the rules the way they are written and end this insanity.
One final question is cui bono? To whom is the current system a benefit? Do we really expect them to change it on their own?!?
Image of symbol used for the United States Department of Education created in 1980 by Maryland GovPics on Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published at www.mindingthecampus.org
