Who and What Protects Our Kids on Campus?

Summary

A direct follow-up to the David Lewis / Jade Lewis LSU episode (2021-02-16). Lisa Stone hosts two experts to translate the legal framework that failed Jade Lewis into actionable knowledge for tennis families. Karen Truszkowski is an attorney specializing in Title IX and Clery Act cases who previously served as a law professor. Katherine (Kathy) Redmond is the founder of the Weed Lead Project, started in 1998 after she filed the first Title IX lawsuit against the University of Nebraska following her own rape there; she has worked with hundreds of victim families. Together they cover what Title IX and the Clery Act actually are, where mandatory reporting obligations have shifted (August 2020 rule change substantially weakened college-level mandatory reporting), FERPA’s use as institutional shield, the structural reasons athletic departments protect revenue-sport perpetrators, and specific steps parents can take before their child enrolls and during enrollment.

Guest Background

Karen Truszkowski is an attorney with extensive Title IX casework and former law professor experience. She operates at the intersection of federal education law and civil litigation. Her practical expertise is translating federal statutory requirements into actionable guidance for families who are in crisis or trying to prevent it.

Katherine (Kathy) Redmond founded the Weed Lead Project in 1998 after filing the first Title IX lawsuit against the University of Nebraska for rape that occurred there. She is a survivor herself who disclosed in the episode that she was raped in college and did not tell her parents — a decision she made to protect them. Her organization has worked with hundreds of victim families over 23 years and specifically focuses on the power dynamics within athletic departments that enable cover-ups.

Key Findings

1. What Title IX Actually Is — and What It Is Not

Title IX is a federal statute with a simple mandate: no student’s education may be interfered with based on their gender. Its application in the campus violence context: if a student is sexually harassed or assaulted and that experience interferes with their ability to pursue their education (fear of attending class, fear of presence of their abuser on campus), Title IX is triggered. Title IX applies to both public and private schools and universities — if the institution receives any federal money (including federal student loans), Title IX applies regardless of religious or private status. It is not limited to athletic programs.

The Clery Act is a separate federal statute focused on reporting and transparency: institutions must collect and publicly report statistics on crimes (not just sexual assault — all crimes including burglary and homicide) occurring on campus. Clery is a reporting mechanism for public accountability, not a victim protection mechanism in itself.

2. The August 2020 Rule Change: Weakening of Mandatory Reporting at University Level

Under rules effective August 2020 (issued May 2020 under Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary), the mandatory reporting obligations for college employees were substantially narrowed. Prior to August 2020: coaches, athletic trainers, professors, and other university employees who learned of gender-based harassment or violence were mandatory reporters, required to escalate reports to the Title IX coordinator. After August 2020: coaches and athletic trainers are no longer mandatory reporters at the university level. The stated rationale (which Karen Truszkowski explicitly disagrees with): schools wanted students to feel comfortable confiding in coaches without fear of automatic reporting. The practical effect: the burden of initiating a formal Title IX complaint now falls on the student themselves. The student must go directly to the Title IX coordinator’s office to file. Other parties can still report (parents can report on behalf of their child), but the institution will reach out to the student to ask if they wish to file formally — the student retains agency but also bears the full initiation burden. Note: at K-12 level, any staff member who learns of gender-based harassment is still a mandatory reporter.

3. How to Read Clery Statistics During College Research

Counterintuitive guidance from Kathy Redmond: a school reporting very low Clery numbers is not necessarily safer. A school with 50,000 students and 3 reported rapes is almost certainly under-reporting. Schools with significantly higher reported numbers may have better reporting systems, more trust from victims, and more functional Title IX infrastructure. National research consistently indicates that approximately 1 in 5 college women will be sexually assaulted. If a school’s Clery numbers deviate dramatically from this baseline, the likely explanation is suppression, not genuine safety. The “red zone” statistic: most assaults occur within the first six weeks of a student’s freshman year.

4. FERPA as Institutional Shield

FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) protects student records from disclosure to third parties — including parents — once the student is 18. Karen Truszkowski’s practical guidance: before your child leaves for college, have them sign a FERPA release. Parents who hold an executed FERPA release can access records and information that institutions would otherwise be able to withhold citing FERPA. She notes that universities routinely invoke FERPA as a shield even in situations where it does not legally apply — having the signed release gives parents a tool to push back. The episode also notes a structural irony: the same universities that invoke FERPA to block parental access to information turn to parents to pay tuition.

A more disturbing application: under FERPA, campus victims cannot learn about other reports filed against their assailant. A serial abuser with seven Title IX reports on file remains invisible to the eighth victim approaching the office. Connecting victims is nearly legally impossible; universities are not required to provide that information.

5. The Athletic Department Power Structure

Kathy Redmond’s structural diagnosis of why tennis coaches at football-revenue schools fail to protect tennis players victimized by football players: it is not incompetence. It is a deliberate power structure. At most major athletic programs, football (and basketball) generate the primary revenue. The athletic department operates semi-autonomously from the university — with its own power relationships extending into campus police, district attorneys’ offices, elected officials, and booster networks. Coaches of “Olympic sports” (tennis, volleyball, golf) are lower in the hierarchy and face pressure from the athletic department to cooperate rather than protect. Redmond specifically investigated the donor records of athletic department officials at multiple universities and found coaches, athletic directors, and presidents all donating to local DA races — creating documented financial relationships between the institution and the prosecutors who would be responsible for investigating crimes committed by the institution’s athletes.

6. Use Off-Campus Services for Counseling and Medical Care

Kathy Redmond’s controversial but experience-grounded guidance: do not use campus counseling or campus medical services if your child has been assaulted. Campus counseling records can and have ended up in the hands of university general counsel offices, which then use them in legal defense. Off-campus providers have no institutional affiliation that creates conflicts of interest. Karen Truszkowski confirms she has had multiple clients whose campus counseling records were obtained by university attorneys.

7. The Limits of Parental Control Over Adult Children

Both guests address the common reaction to the Lewis case — “Why did they let her go back?” — directly. Redmond notes from personal experience that she did not tell her own parents when she was raped, as an act of protection and love, not failure. Victims frequently work to protect their families from the pain of knowing. The cycle of victim behavior (self-protection, return to the abuser environment, minimization of the experience) is documented and predictable. Parents cannot assume their adult child will disclose, cannot assume a disclosure will be followed by cooperation with any response plan, and cannot assume their instinct (“I would pull them immediately”) would survive the actual experience of having an adult child in that situation.

Actionable Advice for Families

• When your child commits to a college, immediately locate the Title IX coordinator on the school’s website; if you cannot find it, call and ask — a school that makes this difficult is a signal
• Have your child sign a FERPA release before they leave; keep the original; this gives you legal standing to access records if needed
• Understand that after August 2020, coaches and athletic trainers at the college level are no longer mandatory reporters — your child cannot assume that telling a coach is equivalent to making a Title IX report; they must go to the Title IX coordinator’s office themselves (or parents can report on their behalf)
• Use off-campus counseling and medical providers, not campus resources, if your child has experienced violence — campus records can be accessed by university attorneys
• Higher Clery-reported numbers may indicate better reporting infrastructure, not more danger; extremely low numbers at large schools are a warning sign, not a reassurance
• Title IX applies to private universities as long as they receive any federal money, including student loans — do not accept an institution’s claim that it doesn’t apply

INTENNSE Relevance

• Player welfare infrastructure: INTENNSE is a professional employer, not an educational institution with FERPA and Title IX obligations — but the episode’s framework is directly applicable: INTENNSE should have a formal, independent harassment and violence reporting channel that is not routed through team management; the structural problem at LSU was that all reporting channels led back to the institution doing the suppressing
• Coach vetting: Kathy Redmond’s observation that Olympic sport coaches face institutional pressure to protect revenue sport perpetrators is a specific dynamic INTENNSE should consider when hiring coaches with prior college coaching experience; coaches who stayed silent in prior institutional contexts may carry those habits
• Parent education: Many INTENNSE player families will have daughters (and sons) going through college recruiting; this episode’s legal framework (Title IX filing process, FERPA release, Clery statistics interpretation, off-campus services) is the kind of resource INTENNSE can share as a value-add to its player families — demonstrating that INTENNSE cares about the whole player, not just on-court performance
• Broadcast/storytelling: The structural diagnosis from Kathy Redmond — “It is not incompetence, it is a deliberate power structure” — is a specific, quotable framing for the LSU story and for any INTENNSE content addressing athlete welfare in college environments; it reframes the question from “how could this happen” to “this is how the system was designed”
• Recruiting pitch: INTENNSE’s professional environment — where players are employed adults, not 18-year-olds placed in institutional care with suppressed reporting infrastructure — is a genuine differentiator in player welfare; the league can articulate this distinction honestly in recruitment materials directed at players navigating the college-to-pro transition

Notable Quotes

“Title IX is there to make sure that there is a responsibility by the school to ensure her education — that she is safe in her education, that she is not discriminated against.”

“Under the new rule, coaches are not mandatory reporters. Athletic trainers are not mandatory reporters.”

“If you look at all of the research, it’s one in five women. One in five will be sexually assaulted on a college campus.”

“The really hard part in college and university level is 18-year-old freshmen — they don’t know what the Title IX office is.”

“I don’t believe that they’re inept. I don’t believe that they’re incompetent. I believe that this is the system that was set up and who needs to hold the power in the system is football.”

“When I was raped, I did not tell my parents. My job, as I saw it, was to protect them from the hurt that I was going through.”

“Until you’re in that situation, until you have a 20-year-old child, you don’t really understand the limits of your abilities and powers.”