College Anti-Harassment Bill Mandates Tech-Focused Policies, Authorizes $50M Annually for Campus Safety Grants

The Tyler Clementi Higher Education Anti-Harassment Act of 2025 is setting out to drag campus safety rules into the digital age. Simply put, this bill requires colleges and universities that accept federal student aid to completely overhaul how they define, report, and prevent harassment, especially when it happens online or via mobile devices. It also authorizes a substantial new competitive grant program, with up to $50 million per year through 2031, to help schools actually pay for these upgrades.

The New Mandate: Defining Harassment in the Digital Era

If your kid is heading off to a school that takes federal aid (which is most of them), that school is now required to update its annual security report to include specific definitions for terms like “electronic communication” and “commercial mobile service.” This is a necessary move because the legislation mandates that schools prohibit harassment—based on race, sex, religion, etc.—that occurs “in whole or in part through text messages, commercial mobile services, or other electronic communications.” For students, this means that the harassment policy they receive on orientation day will finally cover everything from cyberbullying in a school-controlled network to digital harassment happening over text message, which is a huge step toward modernizing accountability.

Crucially, schools must also detail exactly what steps they take to prevent harassment and what procedures they follow once a report is made. This section (SEC. 2) requires institutions to explicitly state that both the person making the accusation and the person accused will be informed of the outcome of any disciplinary proceedings. This is a significant point for procedural fairness, ensuring transparency in the final decision, though institutions will still need to figure out how to balance this with privacy concerns during the investigation itself.

Follow the Money: Grants for Action

Compliance isn’t cheap, and the bill recognizes that. Section 3 establishes a new competitive grant program, run by the Secretary of Education, designed to fund colleges and universities that want to start, expand, or improve their anti-harassment programs. This is where the $50 million annual authorization comes in. Schools can use this money for three main things: prevention programs, offering counseling and resolution services for both victims and accused students, and training faculty and staff on how to spot and handle harassment.

This grant program is structured to reward the schools that need the help the most and those that show the greatest potential for success. For regular folks, this means that the administrative costs of updating policies and training staff might actually be offset by federal dollars, potentially preventing these costs from being passed directly down to students via tuition hikes. It also means that the quality of anti-harassment programs across campuses could become more standardized and evidence-based, as the Secretary is required to use the grant recipients’ data to publish best practices for everyone.

Keeping Existing Protections Intact

One common concern with new legislation is whether it accidentally guts existing rights. Section 4 addresses this directly, stating that the requirements of this Act are additional to any existing protections under major civil rights laws like Title IX, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Think of it as adding a new layer of protection and accountability specific to modern harassment issues, without weakening the foundation that’s already there. This ensures that students retain all their previous legal avenues while gaining new, technology-specific guarantees against harassment.