Right before Christmas 2022, the First Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a case by a student at Stonehill College, a small school of less than 2,500 students in Easton, Massachusetts who had sued after being expelled by a Title IX campus court. The First Circuit reversed the decision of the…
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I. The Tyranny of the Campus HR Department At Allen Harris, we are seeing an increasing trend that attacks faculty rights on campus. Colleges and universities are ceding supervision of faculty to their human resource departments. It is a growing trend that students and colleagues routinely weaponize petty grievances to…
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A disturbing new survey released late last month, conducted by McLaughlin & Associates for the William F. Buckley, Jr. Program at Yale, found that college students were surprisingly willing to say that violence might be an appropriate reaction to “hateful” views. Worse, responses to one of the questions suggest that…
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As college students prepare for Halloween parties, college administrators send out predictable warnings about the importance of not offending anyone with a Halloween costume. Whitman College, for example, cautions against anything that might “trivialize human suffering or oppression” – like a prisoner costume. The University of Nebraska and the University…
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A Massachusetts family recently scored a huge win for students against the Governor’s Academy (formerly known as the Governor Dummer Academy), a private New England high school, for breach of contract and violation of Title IX. Lawsuits against private high schools are notoriously difficult. Private high schools can expel students…
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Last Friday saw a huge legal development in the area of First Amendment law and its application to social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is the federal appeals court covering Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, issued its long-awaited…
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