GSE Colloquium Series in Education & Organizations: Celene Reynolds

Imperfect Gains and Unintended Consequences: The Trajectory of Title IX in US Higher Education

Celene Reynolds is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Unlawful Advances: How Feminists Transformed Title IX (Princeton University Press, 2025). Her award-winning work has also appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, among other outlets, and received support from the National Science Foundation and the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy. She is a former National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-25) and Dissertation Fellow (2018-19).

The application of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to sexual harassment remains enormously controversial. Over the last 15 years, US federal officials have issued three different policies specifying what it means to comply with this civil rights law, which prohibits schools from discriminating “on the basis of sex.” These political and organizational battles over Title IX center on the question of how, not whether, the law should regulate sexual harassment. All this is recent: the university policies, procedures, and infrastructure at the heart of the current debate did not exist fifty years ago. Back then, at the time of the law’s passage, no one understood sexual harassment as a problem that schools ought to address. How and why did sexual harassment become illegal under Title IX? Drawing on multiple types of evidence, much never before unearthed, I argue that the women claiming protection under Title IX redefined sexual harassment as a form of sex discrimination barred by the law. Working together in what I call creative coalitions, feminist students and lawyers fundamentally changed the right to equal opportunity in education, reshaping university governance and campus norms. Their collaborations spanned the domains of education and law, generated novel ideas and pathways for action, and enabled these women to make history. The civil rights project they initiated is now facing strong opposition, however, amid a broader refusal of the liberal model of sociopolitical organization in America and throughout the world. I briefly discuss how feminist advocates unintentionally created an opening for this opposition, helping place Title IX on a new trajectory.