In Unlawful Advances, Celene Reynolds answers a question frequently posed to instructors of courses on gender and public policy, not to mention by faculty more broadly who are hoping to contextualize their annual trainings on supporting students under duress: how did Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 come to adjudicate responses to sexual violence on American college campuses? The book offers an insightful account of Title IX’s legal transformation between the early 1970s and “the near present” (p. 20). In the tradition of Mary Katzenstein’s 1999 monograph, Faithful and Fearless, Reynolds explains the institutional transformation of policy and practice in American higher education, focusing on the actions of women who pushed for change. Her central contribution is in demonstrating how the contemporary regulatory regime surrounding campus sexual misconduct—the catch-all term for sexual harassment and gendered violence experienced by students, faculty, and academic staff in the context of campus life and work—was neither anticipated by the statute’s architects nor simply imposed by federal agencies in policy implementation. Instead, Reynolds argues, it emerged from the strategic and often improvisational efforts of feminist students and lawyers who reframed experiences of gendered harm as actionable civil rights violations. The book situates this legal transformation within a broader aperture of social movement mobilization, campus politics, and the organizational dynamics of university governance, revealing the important histories of feminist activism at work in the courts and in the emergent Title IX bureaucracy.

Unlawful Advances nicely complements existing accounts of activism on Title IX, such as Sherry Boschert’s 2022 book, 37 Words, which offered an historically grounded, journalistic account of policy development. Whereas Boschert relies heavily on interviews, Reynolds turns predominantly to the archives (although she also incorporates interviews to triangulate her interpretation of campus and governmental records). The book is based on a strong empirical foundation, weaving rich evidence from the institutional histories at Yale, Cornell, and the University of California–Berkeley (UC-Berkeley), together with an impressive original dataset of federal Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Title IX complaints from 1994 to 2018. Each campus context comprises a chapter and reveals how the nomenclature of “sexual harassment” arose to define the problem (at Cornell), how the term was first mobilized in legal filings (at Yale, where readers will learn how this history is dramatically inflected through political science), and how it became embedded in the institutional processes for addressing discrimination in OCR and on campuses across the country in the 1980s (at UC-Berkeley). This corpus of historicized research allows Reynolds to trace both the microlevel dynamics of institutional conflict and the macro-level evolution of legal and bureaucratic compliance structures in novel ways. Paired with analyses of federal OCR Title IX complaints, Reynolds portrays the history of Title IX’s application to sexual misconduct as contingent on feminist organizing both within and beyond the academy and subject to feedback effects across time as different legal jurisdictions grappled with the standards for institutional accountability in addressing harassment. The text is theoretically informed and eminently accessible for undergraduate audiences, and it engages literatures in sociolegal studies, organizational theory, and the sociology of political organizing. What emerges is a compelling account of how activists, administrators, and regulators co-produced new interpretations of law and embedded them within organizational routines.

Reynolds’ analysis illuminates how legal ideas become institutionalized in universities through political pressure, bureaucratic structures, and administrative extemporization. She presents a nuanced portrait of how the negotiation over the meanings of the law operates “on the ground,” shaped not only by courts and agencies but by ordinary people demanding recognition and redress to harm. The emergent picture of Title IX’s transformation from limited congressional statute—indeed, Boschert’s title and the four-part 2022 ESPN docuseries by the same name, highlight that the core text is a mere “thirty-seven words” in length—to the cornerstone of sexual harassment policy in American education foregrounds contingency over inevitability. The current interpretations of Title IX, Reynolds shows, were not legally predetermined but were, rather, the result of feminist activism across multiple generations led primarily by students and lawyers who creatively and collaboratively demanded interpretations of the civil rights statute that would define abusive behaviors as “sexual harassment,” and clarity on the relationship between sex discrimination and sexual misconduct. Excavating the role of multiple individuals in this journey is one of the book’s greatest strengths, as it clarifies the conflict and human agency at the core of policy development.

While Reynolds’ narrative foregrounds the ingenuity of those who aimed to expand the law’s enforcement, readers will find less in the text about how the evolutions on harassment protections dovetailed with Title IX’s other targeted realms, namely school-sponsored athletics and nondiscrimination protections on university admissions and faculty hiring (e.g., see Deondra Rose’s 2018 book, Citizens by Degree). Her analyses of OCR records reveal that students and faculty filed nearly as many federal complaints on discrimination in academics and athletics as they did on sexual harassment over the past 30 years. However, Reynolds’ research design enables only an interpretation of legal development in the latter realm. As other scholarship on the politics of women’s athletics suggests, the battle for inclusion in sports required similar visionary and even audacious legal activism by college-aged plaintiffs to challenge the exclusionary status quo (e.g., see Kelly Belanger’s 2017 book, Invisible Seasons, or Deborah Brake’s 2010 Getting in the Game). Yet Unlawful Advances replicates the relative limitation of extant scholarship on the politics of Title IX (some of my own, included) by not simultaneously looking “sideways” across Title IX’s development in sports, academics, and harassment concerns (including that which determines the limits on redress for LGBTQ+ exclusion and harassment) to understand how the policy developed as a whole, informed by concurrent activism and rulings in multiple domains. Future collaborations among scholars with complementary expertise could give rise to critical insights on policy path dependencies and our sticky inability to eradicate sex discrimination in education.

Still, this empirical limitation presents exciting possibilities for the classroom. This book could be productively taught in classes on gender and politics alongside other recent campus studies on sexual cultures (such as Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s 2020 book, Sexual Citizens) or the emergent histories of sometimes conflictual second-wave feminist activism within and beyond higher education (e.g., Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink’s 2022 book, Fierce and Fearless). In an era where many of us may struggle to find hope for the expansion of civil rights for historically marginalized groups, Reynolds delivers a reminder that the journey toward systemic change to sex discrimination in education has always been uncertain and unpredictable, yet amenable to transformation by those creative activists who remained courageous and steadfast in their demands for a better world.