Thomas Crowther was investigated, disciplined, and eventually pushed out of his job as an art professor at Augusta University over student complaints that he sexually harassed them. Now he wants the Supreme Court to say he was the one discriminated against, using the same civil rights law that protects those students.

He is not the only employee asking. MaChelle Joseph, the former head coach of Georgia Tech’s women’s basketball team, says the university gave her program worse facilities and support than the men’s team received, a far more familiar kind of sex discrimination claim. Their cases were combined on appeal, and on November 30 the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Crowther v. Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia to answer one question for both of them: can a school employee, not just a student, sue under Title IX for sex discrimination at all?

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 bars sex discrimination by any school or college that takes federal money, which covers nearly every public school and most private ones. The statute never actually says, in its text, that a person can sue to enforce it. The Supreme Court filled that gap itself in 1979, ruling in Cannon v. University of Chicago that Title IX carries an implied right for “victims of discrimination” to bring their own lawsuits, even though Congress never wrote that right into the law. Cannon was a student rejected from medical school. The opinion didn’t say that the right to sue was only for students, but it didn’t specifically say it could be used by employees either, and that issue is the whole case here.

Both employees sued in federal district court, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, which covers Georgia, combined their cases on appeal. Last year it ruled against Crowther and Joseph, holding that Title IX’s implied right to sue belongs only to students, since they have no other law protecting them, while employees can already turn to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the main federal law against job discrimination. That put the Eleventh Circuit at odds with eight other federal appeals courts, which had let employees sue under Title IX for years. The Supreme Court agreed in May to settle the split and set the case for argument this fall.

Crowther and Joseph lean heavily on a second precedent, Jackson v. Birmingham Board of Education, a 2005 case in which the Court let a high school coach sue under Title IX after he said he was fired for complaining that the girls’ team he coached got fewer resources than the boys’ team. Jackson was an employee, and the Court let him sue for retaliation, reasoning that punishing someone for reporting sex discrimination is itself a form of sex discrimination. If that reasoning holds, the petitioners argue in their brief, an employee facing direct sex discrimination should be able to sue too, not only one facing retaliation. They also point to a 1986 law in which Congress ratified the Cannon approach without narrowing it to students, and to the fact that most circuits to consider the question after Jackson agreed with them.

The Board of Regents reads Jackson much more narrowly. In its brief, the university system argues that Jackson protected an employee who was standing up for students, not one suing over his own job treatment, and that those are different kinds of claims. The brief also leans on the fact that Congress already built a detailed system for workplace sex discrimination through Title VII, with its own filing deadlines and administrative steps, and argues the Court should not read Title IX as creating a second, looser path to the same kind of lawsuit. The Justice Department has sided with Georgia here too, filing its own brief in support of the university system after the Court invited its views. That argument also fits a pattern on the current Court, which has grown cautious about stretching rights that judges created rather than ones Congress spelled out directly. Justice Kavanaugh made exactly that point in a 2022 opinion, writing that expanding an implied right like the one in Cannon is Congress’s job, not the Court’s.

At oral argument, listen for how far the justices think Cannon’s language about “victims of discrimination” was ever meant to reach, and whether Jackson’s ruling logically requires recognizing a broader right or whether retaliation on behalf of students is different in kind from other discrimination claims. Expect questions, too, about how Title IX and Title VII are supposed to fit together: does a detailed employment discrimination law mean Congress meant to leave school employees out of Title IX, or were the two statutes always meant to overlap for people who work in education? Because the Court has spent the last two decades narrowing implied rights of action in other areas of law, some justices may focus less on the facts of this particular dispute and more on whether Cannon should still be read as broadly as it once was. The Solicitor General’s office has also asked for its own time at the lectern, so expect three voices at the podium instead of two.

Crowther’s own case adds a wrinkle the Court may need to sort out separately. He was not defending anyone else’s rights. He was contesting the outcome of an investigation into his own conduct, which the Eleventh Circuit said made his claim even further removed from Jackson than Joseph’s straightforward unequal resources dispute.