Department of Education gives San Jose State ten days to comply with Title IX or face federal funding cut over male volleyball player

The Department of Education announced Tuesday it is issuing a "Letter of Impending Enforcement Action" to San Jose State University over the school's handling of a biological male competing on its women's volleyball team. SJSU now has ten days to comply with Title IX or face referral to the Department of Justice and the potential termination of federal funding.

The ultimatum caps a standoff that began in January, when the Department concluded that SJSU's policies violated Title IX by prioritizing transgender-identifying male athletes over women. The university was offered a chance to resolve the violation voluntarily. It refused.

Instead, SJSU sued.

What the investigation found

The Department's Office for Civil Rights conducted an investigation centered on SJSU's handling of volleyball player Blaire Fleming from 2022 to 2024. According to Breitbart, OCR found that SJSU actively recruited Fleming and allowed him to compete on both the women's indoor and beach volleyball teams beginning in 2022.

The findings go well beyond roster decisions. According to the Department, SJSU told coaching staff not to inform female players that the athlete was a man. The university also allegedly took action that discouraged women from participating in the Title IX process, the very mechanism designed to protect them.

The physical consequences were real. The Department stated that on multiple occasions, the male athlete spiked the ball so forcefully that it knocked female players on opposing teams to the ground. During one season, seven all-women's teams from other universities forfeited their competitions entirely, accepting a loss rather than competing against a male.

Seven teams chose to lose rather than play. That is not a culture war talking point. That is women calculating the physical risk and walking away.

Retaliation, not protection

Perhaps the most revealing detail in the Department's findings involves what happened when a female SJSU volleyball player joined a Title IX lawsuit against the NCAA. According to ED, she discovered that the male student had conspired to have a member of an opposing team spike her in the face during an upcoming match.

SJSU did not investigate the conspiracy.

What the university did do was subject the female athlete to a Title IX complaint for reportedly "misgendering" the male athlete when discussing the incident in online videos and interviews. The system built to protect women in athletics was turned into a weapon against a woman who spoke up about her own safety.

This is what institutional capture looks like in practice. The female athlete was the one who faced consequences. Not the male athlete on the women's team. Not the individual allegedly plotting to injure her. The woman who used the wrong pronoun.

SJSU's response: litigation and platitudes

Rather than comply with the Department's findings, SJSU filed a lawsuit alongside the California State University system against ED, demanding the Department rescind its findings and continue funding the university. SJSU president Dr. Cynthia Teniente-Matson published a blog post on March 6 framing the matter as a question of inclusion. She wrote:

"Our support for the LGBTQ members of our community, who have experienced threats and harms over the last several years remains unwavering. We know the attention the university has received around this issue and the investigative process that followed have been unsettling for many in our community."

Unsettling. That is the word she chose. Not for the women who forfeited games. Not for the player who faced retaliation. For "the community" unsettled by the investigation itself.

Teniente-Matson continued with a declaration that the university is "dedicated to fostering an inclusive, supportive environment that encourages full participation in all aspects of university life without fear of harm or exclusion." She then said the university would be "unable to comment further" due to the litigation.

The statement never mentions the female athletes by name, by category, or by concern. The women who lost playing time, lost titles, and lost the basic expectation that their locker rooms would be single-sex spaces do not appear in the president's calculus. Inclusion, in this framing, runs in only one direction.

The enforcement clock starts now

Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Kimberly Richey laid out the Department's position plainly:

"We have provided SJSU with multiple opportunities to resolve its Title IX violations with common sense actions: separating male and female athletes based on their biological sex, keeping men out of women's locker rooms and bathrooms, restoring rightfully-earned titles and accolades to female athletes, and apologizing to the women forced to forfeit competitions to protect themselves. Yet, SJSU remains obstinate, choosing a radical ideology over safety, dignity, and fairness for its own students."

The demands are worth noting individually. The Department is requiring SJSU to:

• Separate male and female athletes based on biological sex
• Remove men from women's locker rooms and bathrooms
• Restore titles and accolades to the female athletes who earned them
• Apologize to the women who forfeited rather than compete against a male

None of these are radical. Every one of them would have been considered baseline common sense a decade ago. The fact that a public university is willing to risk its entire federal funding stream rather than acknowledge biological reality tells you everything about where the institutional incentives now point.

The real test

SJSU's gamble is that the courts will bail it out before the ten-day clock expires. The university and CSU are betting that a federal judge in California will side with gender ideology over the plain text of Title IX, a law written specifically to protect women in education.

The Department of Education is betting otherwise. And unlike previous administrations that issued guidance letters and hoped for voluntary compliance, this one attached a consequence: lose federal money or protect women. Pick one.

For years, universities operated in a world where they could place male athletes on women's teams, punish female athletes who objected, and face no meaningful repercussions. The cost was absorbed entirely by the women. Seven teams forfeited in a single season, and not one institutional authority stepped in to ask whether the policy was the problem.

Now someone is asking. SJSU has ten days to answer.