A new lawsuit involving sexual assault witch-hunting combined with free speech issues is targeting Yale, the University where Free Speech is supposedly safely and permanently protected by promises made in the mid-1970s Woodward Report, the Wall Street Journal told us yesterday.
Doe alleges Yale violated his 14th Amendment rights to due process and equal protection of the law.
This case also involves free expression because it began, Doe alleges, with Yale’s draconian regulation of his speech. According to his lawsuit, in late 2013 a female philosophy teaching assistant filed a complaint with the university’s Title IX office about a short paper Doe had written. In the context of Socrates ’ account in Plato’s “Republic†of the tripartite soul, the paper argued that rape was an irrational act in which the soul’s appetitive and spirited parts overwhelm reason, which by right rules.
According to the lawsuit, Pamela Schirmeister, Title IX coordinator and an associate dean in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, summoned Doe to her office and told him his rape example was “unnecessarily provocative.†She ordered him to have no contact with the teaching assistant and directed him to attend sensitivity training at the university’s mental-health center. She also informed him that he had become a “person of interest†to Yale, which meant that the university had to intervene to ensure he “was not a perpetrator himself,†in the lawsuit’s words. A few months later, the same Title IX office initiated the sexual-assault investigation against him.
Through a spokeswoman, Yale described the lawsuit as “legally baseless and factually inaccurate†but declined on confidentiality grounds to address any specific factual allegations.
If the lawsuit’s account is accurate, Yale has reached a new low in the annals of campus policing of speech.
Full story.
Hat tip to classmate Seattle Sam.
Seattle Sam
There would be a certain poetic justice to using Title IX to protect men; however I can hear Elena Kagan now. “Although the law reads that ‘no person’ may be discriminated against based on sex, it’s quite clear that Congress intended these protections to apply only to persons who identify as women.”
[WSJ Story https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-lawsuit-accuses-yale-of-censoring-even-inoffensive-ideas-1491163998%5D
GoneWithTheWind
Title IX is terrible law and resulted in even worse policies and results. It was an intentional “taking” by using the classic trick of disguising it as furthering a right for an oppressed group. It has disenfranchised millions of men and wrongly put many innocent men into the justice system. It is regularly abused by activist women to intentionally oppress men. It is at it’s core intentionally sexist. It should be replaced with a law that reinforces the rights of all without carving out a special group to receive special treatment.
Boligat
I was teaching in a jr. high school (7-9) when Title IX was instituted. One of the results was that our social studies department had to give up our annual field trip for every kid in the school in order to free up enough transportation money to haul 15 girls on the newly required volleyball team (to even out the sports offerings) all over the county to play. I suggested that if we gave up football, then we wouldn’t need volleyball and then the social studies department could continue to haul every kid in the school to someplace interesting once a year.
The murmuring started with the coaches, and soon spread to the rest of the faculty and staff. I thought they were going to lynch me.
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