The nationwide debate over free speech and safe spaces on college campuses has taken a bizarre turn in Costa Mesa. Orange Coast College (OCC) suspended a student for a full semester because he recorded his professor calling Donald Trump’s election “an act of terrorism” and posted the video online.
In one clip published by The Register, Olga Perez Stable Cox, a human sexuality instructor at OCC, tells her class the election of President Trump means, “We have been assaulted, it’s an act of terrorism. The people who committed the assault are among us, it’s not some stranger coming in from another country coming in and attacking our sense of what it means to be an American.”
The student, Caleb O’Neil, claims the professor also said she would “no longer tolerate any person who voted for Trump.” O’Neil, who campaigned for Trump, says he was afraid his instructor would retaliate against him so he recorded her comments and shared them with school administrators. A week later, he went public with the recording, which quickly went viral. The professor received a torrent of abusive messages from Trump supporters, forcing her to temporarily move out of her home.
The college says O’Neil violated the student code of conduct, as well as Cox’s syllabus, which prohibits students from recording class proceedings. “Unauthorized recording is a serious violation of the Student Code of Conduct,” wrote Interim Dean of Students Victoria Lugo in a letter to O’Neil.
To be allowed back into school, O’Neil must write an apology letter to Cox and letter explaining why he shared the video publicly, the “damage to Orange Coast College students, faculty and staff,” and how he “will prevent this from happening again.”
Does the university have the right to punish O’Neil? It’s a little complicated. Most states permit the recording of private conversations, as long as one of the parties involved consents. But some states, including California, require two-party consent. There are exceptions, however. Statements made in public might not be protected since a speaker in a public setting doesn’t necessarily have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Whether a university classroom counts as a public setting is legitimately debatable, as far as I can tell.
But it’s important to note, O’Neil isn’t being charged with violating the law — he’s accused of violating university policy and the class syllabus. O’Neil is appealing his suspension and his lawyer, Bill Becker, turned up the rhetoric by saying the school’s actions are “an attack by leftists in academia to protect the expressive rights of their radical instructors at the expense of the expressive rights of conservative students on campus.”
That’s his argument. The school’s argument is professors should have the right to declare their classrooms a zone of privacy, and O’Neil very clearly violated Cox’s.
The notion that a public university can compel a student to write an apology for publicizing his professor’s political statements is a bit worrisome. Students should generally be protected from compelled speech. But, while I find the punishment a bit harsh, I’m also having a hard time coming up with a reason to excuse O’Neil’s behavior.
Cox’s anti-Trump statements might have been over the top, but as a professor at a public college who enjoys robust free speech protections, she had every right to make them.
O’Neil’s contention that he feared retaliation sounds sadly similar to claims made by leftist students who say certain kinds of non-liberal expression make them feel unsafe and require safe spaces. Indeed, I worry that conservative students are increasingly embracing the campus victim narrative and assuming political statements they don’t like are targeted acts of intolerance.
When college students hear something from a professor that makes them uncomfortable, they ought to ask questions and challenge it. Students, conservative and liberal, need to learn how to think critically, defend their points of view, and listen to ideas — even the ones coming from professors they completely disagree with. Let’s leave college administrators out of those conversations.
Robby Soave is associate editor at Reason magazine and Reason.com.
Our editors found this article on this site using Google and regenerated it for our readers.
