Sadly yes.
Yes.
“Only accusers who are making it all up will be “chilled away” by the cops”
Of course, this isn’t true. We’re talking about a bunch of flawed humans (both accusers and cops). Cops aren’t perfect detectors of truth, and accusers aren’t perfect predictors of cop behavior. This situation is difficult and scary. Everyone will make errors.
How much further are colleges going to stretch Title IX…this came up in my google alerts this morning and pretty chiling. A college expelled a guy for calling is girlfriend a “pscyho bth” in Twitter. This is scary stuff folks. FIRE filed an amicus brief.
I like one of FIRE’s comments:
Not exactly.
They told him to stop harassing his girlfriend on public social media, after he was arrested for beating her up. He kept doing it. They warned him to stop or they’d throw him out. He kept doing it. So they threw him out.
The Yeasin case is not a great example of university overreach, IMHO. He was stalking her. The boyfriend agreed to a no-contact order in exchange for a judge dropping domestic violence charges. The university instituted a parallel no-contact order. Then he repeatedly and publicly tweeted nasty things aimed at the ex-girlfriend, which though they did not include her name, were indisputably about her. The university warned him to stop, and he kept doing it. Only then was he expelled.
The ACLU agrees with FIRE that this was a First Amendment violation. Notwithstanding my ACLU membership, I don’t agree. In this context, given the history between the two students, I believe he can constitutionally be excluded from a public campus, and that he ought to be.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2014/nov/01/expelled-twitter-posts-former-ku-student-fights-un/
@Hanna, serious question, but do you draw a distinction between this case and the actions of “Mattress Girl”, or do you think it would have been appropriate/reasonable for Columbia to throw her off campus as well?
If you follow that logic then Columbia would have had every right to expel mattress girl as she was harassing the guy, worse yet mattress girl was doing it on campus…the point is that this defendant was off campus using a private Twitter account and never named the ex-girlfriend - so did not violate the college’s campus restrictions or Code but was expelled.
The district court has sided with the defense, and the college has filed a motion to reconsider. The district court citing:
Is that a Title IX problem, or the simple fact that some college administrations have a tendency to overreach in policing what they perceive as insulting speech (cf. “water buffaloes”)?
“do you draw a distinction between this case and the actions of “Mattress Girl”, or do you think it would have been appropriate/reasonable for Columbia to throw her off campus as well?”
Yes, I think there is a critical distinction in that there was a history of violence and an existing and plausible criminal charge against the harasser for battery, criminal restraint, and criminal deprivation of property. In other words, the legal system thought that he had physically harmed and stalked her. He’d be dealing with those charges in court if he hadn’t agreed not to contact her in any way. That context changes the reasonable meaning of these tweets from obnoxious to menacing.
That said, if Columbia chose to expel or suspend Mattress Girl for harassment, I would have thought they were within their rights. (That’s an easier call because they’re a private school, unlike KU.)
I don’t know dfbdfb, speculation is that colleges and universities are “using” Title IX as justification for the free speech infringement. I found this amicus brief interesting since it touches on both free speech (which was the point of the brief) and college and universities punishing students outside the bounds of their procedures and processes. The guy sounds like a jerk, but jerks have rights, too. As the judge said no matter whether we “like” or dislike the Yeasin guy, technically he had a right to free speech and technically the college had no jurisdiction over what he said in his private social media circles and off campus.
Ohiodad51, look at the time stamp…we both had the mattress girl thought at the same time 
Fair enough. I would be interested to know if the guy actually violated the no contact order put in place by the Judge, and if he did, why the police/courts were not involved. If his actions in using twitter did not violate the no contact order, I think the distinction becomes much harder to draw.
I do not know that the public/private college distinction means much in these cases actually. It appears there is enough money involved to trigger the application of Title IX, which should provide ample jurisdiction for the courts under the expansive interpretation of the statute.
BTW, where do you find the charge for battery? I read the article, and it seemed that he took her phone (deprivation of property) and wouldn’t let her out of the car (restraint). Did I miss something that would constitute battery?
Also, I gotta say, that you would think anybody that stupid would flunk out of college in the first place. Jeez.
http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2014/nov/01/expelled-twitter-posts-former-ku-student-fights-un/
That’s the link @Hanna already posted. But @Ohiodad51, I was going to ask you why, in the described circumstances, they’d charge him with battery and not kidnapping. I guess the criminal restraint stands in for kidnapping. And I guess there was some sort of alleged physical altercation that led to the battery charge.
If I were this woman’s mother, I’d be frantic when the guy kept harassing her.
I’ve come to believe that Columbia should have had Sulkowicz dial back her references to her “rapist” in her art project.
But one difference between the Columbia case and the Kansas case is that Nungesser would not have been in fear for his life. But the Kansas guy was defying the college non-contact order after warnings, and (perhaps) defying the court order against indirect contact as well. He had already restrained her in his car and beat her. What was he going to do next? I’d be frightened if I were her.
If I recollect correctly, a charge of kidnapping requires a claim for ransom, which may be the distinction here. And yes, there is nothing in the article that seems to support the battery charge, unless he physically took her phone from her.
In any event, this seems another example of more here than meets the eye. I doubt that a DA would charge a guy like this if the first serious altercation between these two was what seems to be an argument in the car where she is yelling let me out and he is saying no. Again, I would be interested to know if he actually violated the Court order, and if so why the DA did not bring him in on contempt charges at least.
I don’t know, but I had to call the police because a “psycho bth” was stalking one of my sons, calling the police and telling them he was having an underage party (at our house, he wasn’t) and she was creeping ME out because she kept coming close to the house to try and see if his car was there and I wanted a police record. The text messages she sent, were shall I say, interesting. She was mad at him because he kept turning her down (if you know what I mean). There are wack-a-doodles male and female…and I think police try to be reasonable - the fact that they charged Yeasin at all is interesting (but good). Not sure how battery comes into it, but maybe he was struggling with her over the phone.
In terms of what sort of speech (including symbolic speech) is permissible by students, in most states it means quite a lot, actually.
If I were her, I’d want to get him to stop the tweets, in the fastest and easiest way I could think of. I’d first go to the college because I’d think it would be easier and quicker. What I mean to say is, she might not have reported the tweets to the Court.
Actually, this entire area of developing law is growing out of an interpretation of Title IX that holds that campuses have at least an arguable positive duty to keep students free from “harassment”, which is the point I was making.
“In terms of what sort of speech (including symbolic speech) is permissible by students, in most states it means quite a lot”
Yes, it does. BYU can expel a student for saying “I reject the Book of Mormon.” They’ve done it before when an LDS student has lost his/her faith. There’s no First Amendment problem there. It’s a church-run, private institution, and they can decide what expressions are forbidden for their students.