Federal Title IX Athletics Compliance Settlement

To the Wagner College neighborhood:

On Aug. 1, 2025, Wagner College and the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) resolved a February 2025 investigation into Wagner’s compliance with Title IX for girls’s athletics.

While it will be important that Wagner continues to foster a welcoming and supportive neighborhood, it is usually obligatory that we adjust to federal legal guidelines as they’re interpreted by the federal authorities, simply as we comply with NCAA guidelines in order to stay eligible to compete in intercollegiate sports activities.

Over the final a number of weeks and months we’ve seen information of establishments resolving federal investigations. I wish to guarantee you that Wagner’s decision is markedly completely different. Working cooperatively with the OCR investigators, we had been capable of negotiate phrases which are restricted, minimally intrusive and tailor-made to the actual details of Wagner’s state of affairs.

The details of this settlement are:

• Wagner College will adjust to Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681 et seq. (“Title IX”) in all of its athletics applications.
• The College won’t — on the idea of intercourse — exclude feminine college students from participation in, deny feminine college students the advantages of, or topic feminine college students to discrimination beneath, any training program or exercise together with however not restricted to athletics applications or actions, which implies that Wagner College won’t permit male college students to compete in any athletic program designated for girls, guaranteeing that solely feminine college students are eligible to compete as a member of ladies’s athletics.
• To the extent the College gives intimate amenities akin to locker rooms and loos accessible to its scholar athletes specifically sports activities, it’s going to proceed to take action strictly separated on the idea of intercourse and comparably supplied to every intercourse.
• The College acknowledges that Title IX applies regardless of any present or future insurance policies that will battle with this assertion from any sporting or scholastic governing our bodies that regulate collegiate athletics.
• The College won’t delegate its obligation to adjust to Title IX to an exterior affiliation or different entity and will not contract or organize with any third-party entity to supply advantages of the College’s education schemes or actions, if that third social gathering entity discriminates on the idea of intercourse in offering any providers or such advantages to Wagner College or its college students– together with by not working athletic actions within the method described within the assertion.
• As of February 5, 2025, all practices, insurance policies, and procedures adopted and carried out by Wagner College with respect to girls’s athletics will adjust to Executive Order 14168, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government (Jan. 20, 2025), in step with Executive Order 14201, Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports (Feb. 5, 2025).

OCR’s investigation was prompted by one Wagner scholar’s participation in girls’s fencing earlier than the issuance of the 2025 Executive Orders cited above. I wish to affirm that in permitting that scholar to take part, Wagner was following the NCAA and USA Fencing guidelines relevant on the time, and our settlement with OCR makes clear that there was no admission or discovering of any wrongdoing by the College. Wagner was and is following the legal guidelines and guidelines as we perceive them to use, and we’ll proceed to take action.

We acknowledge, nonetheless, that some student-athletes had been negatively impacted by Wagner’s following these guidelines. We sincerely apologize to those that skilled a aggressive drawback, and we remorse any misery anybody skilled because of the College’s adherence to the insurance policies in impact on the time.

I would love the campus neighborhood to know that this morning I met with members of our girls’s fencing group in regards to the resolution to resolve this investigation, and I wish to publicly thank them for his or her help of the College, now and over the past 12 months.

As we all know, greater training is within the midst of nice change. Like many establishments, Wagner College is doing what it should to advance its mission throughout this era of turbulence. I consider that it’s of the utmost significance that Wagner set a course that ensures its long-term success, and a part of that’s to proceed to foster an open and supportive neighborhood that follows the legal guidelines and laws with which it should comply. In bringing an finish to this investigation I consider we are able to proceed to do each.

Jeffrey Doggett, Ed.D.
President