December 7, 2023 | NEWS | By Erin Mullins & Michael Braithwaite
Colorado College’s newly hired Assistant Vice President for Civil Rights and Title IX Coordinator David Jensen faced a legal complaint from the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights in his previous role as Title IX Coordinator at Salt Lake Community College, according to an online record of the department’s determination.
But according to Jensen, whose first day at CC on Dec. 1 ended a near eight-month vacancy for the position, the complaint was not reflective of his work as Title IX Coordinator at Salt Lake, where much of his job involved streamlining Title IX policy. The college did not have an accommodations policy for pregnancy at the time, and there was a miscommunication regarding the processes for handling the request, Jensen said.
“[The case] fell on me, even though it shouldn’t have,” Jensen said. “My expertise is in compliance. They are not in the legal issues that are surrounding providing a student with an accommodation.”
According to the record, Salt Lake was found guilty on three allegations of Title IX infractions while Jensen was working as the office’s coordinator. The department concluded that the college failed to fulfill a student’s request for alternative academic accommodations while experiencing pregnancy side effects, a violation of federal Title IX regulations.
As discussed in the report, the student was asking for additional time for assignments and flexibility with the class’s attendance policy due to morning sickness. The Title IX office did not respond to the complainant’s first request for academic accommodation. The complainant then sent a second email, expressing that her professor told her she, “needed to take some responsibility for the things that were going on,” and that she believed the professor would rather help her drop out of the class or fail than try to help her succeed.
The Salt Lake Title IX office did not approve accommodations for the student and did not discuss any alternatives for the course, the report said. Even with medical documentation, the school did not provide any leniency with the attendance policy and how that might affect the student’s grade.
“We were caught in a little bit of the progress machine in that when this report came out,” Jensen said. “I’m not complaining about it because I think it was a fundamental step forward, the college just could have been in a better place, and I wish I’d had better, more receptive administration in listening to the changes that needed to happen long ago.”
For Sara Rotunno, CC director of accessibility resources and chair of the search committee for the new Title IX coordinator, the complaint did not raise any red flags during the hiring process.
“If you look at just sex discrimination cases in post-secondary education right now, there’s like 2,400 pending cases,” Rotunno said. “Having an OCR complaint is something that is not uncommon within education institutions.”
Moreover, Rotunno remains confident in Jensen’s ability to properly fulfill the responsibilities of the Title IX Coordinator.
“I did not think there was a risk – I think he was a clear candidate for hire,” Rotunno said about Jensen as a candidate. “CC was not at a place where they were willing to hire somebody who would not be appropriate for the position.”
Jensen and Rotunno agree that the experience with the complaint was an opportunity to better understand how to update policy to conform with current federal Title IX regulations.
Jensen’s hiring ends a near eight-month vacancy for the position after former Vice President for Civil Rights and Title IX Coordinator Tashana Taylor left the role in the spring. The vacant position was filled in an interim capacity over the summer by Assistant Director for Civil Rights and Deputy Title IX Coordinator Joshua Isringhausen, who also worked in the role before Taylor’s hiring in May 2022. Isringhausen will remain working within the office as deputy coordinator.
The addition of Jensen, Isringhausen said, will be a crucial step toward building back trust within the campus community and give the office the bandwidth to accomplish long-term goals that were set aside while the office was understaffed.
One such goal is building out the college’s non-discrimination, anti-harassment and Title IX policy procedures. These policies, Isringhausen said, were originally intended to be temporary, adopted to bring the college in compliance with the new 2020 Title IX regulations imposed by the Donald Trump Presidential Administration. They were never supposed to last for more than six months.
“We rushed out some policies that were bare minimum legal compliance, but also read like they are bare minimum legal compliance,” Isringhausen said. “They’re dense, they’re full of legalese, they’re hard to understand, but we needed to have a policy that was compliant with federal regulations. So, we introduced those with the intention that we would be updating them with some more significant input from an incoming Title IX coordinator, but based on capacity we never really had the ability to dig into it.”
Ultimately, Jensen and Isringhausen hope to repair the relationship the Title IX office has with the campus community and streamline perceptions of the office with the reality of their work.
Moreover, Jensen believes that CC’s campus environment allows for substantial reform to Title IX policies. To him, the combination of an eager student base and an open-minded administration gives the office all the tools it needs to make necessary changes.
“The administration here is much more acceptable of change and much more willing to accept change that might be uncomfortable,” Jensen said.