I would probably not write a letter.
I base this on my experience getting in trouble in college for something that I believed I was totally in the right about, and my reaction was to absolutely refuse to accept any punishment and fight it. I won.
In this case, I mostly come down on the side of the student anyway. Classrooms seem much more like public space than private, and the reaction here seems to be the administration punishing the student on a technicality mostly for making them look bad.
I understand. . . but I take a different approach. What I argue for here is the application of standards that I believe society should apply, as opposed to a more lenient standard where I argue for personally pleasing outcomes that are reached by questionable means.
Otherwise I’d simply announce what the correct result is in every situation, and brook no dissent, because clearly I should be in charge of everything, and any opinion to the contrary is clearly flawed. 
It’s illegal for the Professor to engage in politics. There was no purpose to this unhinged woman’s rant other than to undermine our incredible new POTUS. She should be fired immediately as she is the real law breaker.
In memory of Judge Wapner:
“Under California law, including Education Code § 7054, school districts are strictly prohibited from engaging in political advocacy using public resources. No use may be made of school property, funds, personnel, supplies or equipment “for the purpose of urging the support or defeat of any ballot measure.” Violation of this provision can either be a misdemeanor or felony and is punishable by fines and/or imprisonment. §7054©.”
The statute in full:
I read this to be targeting electioneering, not classroom speech by instructors. And in any event, the comments were not “urging the support or defeat of any ballot measure or candidate,” but rather commenting on the results of a ballot.
Nope.
Sounded like electioneering to me. She must suffer the consequences of using tax dollar to promote her political agenda. Maybe she can write a 300 page apology. Liberals tend to be long winded so it shouldn’t be too difficult.
IANAL (and NAY), but the actual lawyer in this thread seems to think you’re wrong about that. (For one thing, “electioneering” means you’re trying to advocate for a particular outcome in an election that hasn’t happened yet. Commenting on the results of an election that’s over, no matter how partisan your comments may be, is not “electioneering”.)
Well, in fairness this conclusion is not the result of any serious research on my part. But I agree: insofar as I can see, the plain statutory language would not apply to calling Trump’s election an act of terrorism after the election has happened. That makes it merely commentary on election results.
I welcome correction, with citation to case law, of course.
The kid has lawyers. If the professor were actually breaking the law in this way, and the lawyers didn’t bother to point it out (thereby possibly, I’m spitballing here, invoking some sort of whistleblower statute), they’re super-shitty lawyers.
2020 election. Trump is already campaigning.
Lawyers are some of the laziest people on the planet. The student’s lawyers probably are low energy and didn’t think of unique ways to argue his case.
Hell, look at how many posts there are in this thread and no one else came up with this legal argument.
Occasionally, I’ve been at the courthouse and indigent people think I’m a lawyer. So I dispense some advice here and there. If Obama passed the bar, I probably could too.
I am afraid I still disagree. Statutory construction assumes the legislature does not intend an absurd result. Your construction essentially places any discussion of Trump that is critical or praiseworthy for the next four years away from any California educator in the secondary or community college system.
IANAL so won’t comment on whether a mailed threat is a crime and/or a tort. I can certainly imagine it might cause great fear and thus harm. Point of order rejected.
The need for recording police officers specifically, rather than workers in general, was litigated in a long-ago ruling that included the opinion
Sticks and guns may burst my buns but words will never hurt me.
I agree that the Professor deviated from her syllabus unnecessarily. But, while somewhat hyperbolic, the statement about “terrorism” isn’t clearly wrong. “Terrorists” deliberately perform bad deeds to infect a population with despair and fear. Some Trump voters have proudly admitted that was the purpose of their electoral mischief.
Would you condemn a history teacher who reviews arithmetic when his students are unable to subtract one date from another? That’s just teaching what needs to be taught. The tragedy of November 8th certainly demonstrates that education has failed. I don’t condone the teacher’s rant, but she was trying to teach what so clearly needs to be taught.
I don’t agree that this is the correct legal standard. See Iacobucci v. Boulter, 193 F.3d 14 (1st Cir. 1999), for a First Amendment right to record commissioners in town hall (when the commissioners were unarmed with either sticks or guns); see similarly Blackston v. Alabama, 30 F. 3d 117 (11th Cir. 1994) where petitioners sought to record a meeting of an advisory committee on state child support guidelines; again, insofar as the record reflects, the committee members were unequipped with sticks, except perhaps pencils, and were not toting guns either.
This is a note to let you know that your posts in this thread are hard to distinguish from trolling. This is important because depending on which side of the evaluation you fall, the result is significantly different. I suggest you avoid the appearance of trolling in the future. One way to do this would be to refrain from sweeping generalizations and polemic non sequiturs.
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I had several college teachers who gave me undeservedly-low grades. I had several who knew we disagreed about politics, in different ways and for different reasons.
The amount of teachers who were in both groups equals exactly zero.
This, exactly. In my experience, a professor who disagrees with you politically tends to bend over backwards to give you a fair shake in evaluation. Obviously this own’t be true of all professors, but inasmuch as there’s a connection between political agreement and grades, I think it goes in the opposite direction from what this kid thinks.
I doubt any of the faculty that taught my freshman and sophomore courses could have identified me well enough by name to be vindictive when it came time to grade my papers or tests. That is if they even did their own grading. Plenty of grading at lower undergrad level is farmed out teaching assistants.
There are no winners here.
I thought the student was suing due to being suspended - a two semester suspension for recording a classroom harangue? That seems really excessive to me - even if it was a violation of school rules. I’ll bet there are a lot of students surreptitiously recording lectures to use when they study - going to give them a two semester suspension too? Or is the suspension for recording, disseminating? Or is it for recording, disseminating and giving the school a black eye for the behavior of a professor?
He doesn’t want her fired - he even complimented her as an instructor:
He recorded the professor going off on a rant, tried to get a response from the University, and then it got dumped on the internet where it went to hell, FAST. This is when photos of her house, her home address, photos of her, etc. were spread and the death threats started kicking in. People hunted down her personal life on social media and used that to attack her character as well.
The suspension is only going to give this story a longer life. This should have been dealt with at the Dean level with a private meeting between the student and the professor.
Your last statement was really what I wanted all along but sadly, it would not have happened. The problem was she is 64 years old and a militant lesbian whos used to doing anything she damn well pleases and she was backed up by a powerful union. There is NO WAY IN HELL she would even give a nod to saying what she had done was wrong. In post interviews she has given NO INDICATIONthat anything she said was wrong and boasts to being proud of what she said. She loves playing “victim” and I’m guessing she will now be 100 times worse.
I think a bigger mistake was that the college never sent out a memo to instructors reminding them just what they can and cannot say in their classrooms and also not giving out instructions to students about how to resolve a grievance. Watch students sneak recordings even more.
So yeah, things went public. But thats the price for the college only going after the student.
Well to be honest, the student was a freshman who had no idea if the professor was a fair person or not.
Uhm - just try to tell faculty what they can and can not say in a classroom - let me know how it goes. That entire statement is the full justification for tenure - so that faculty are free to teach without being told what to say by others.
I recently lectured on the Middle East as a guest speaker. If the school told me not to talk about Saudi participation in 9/11, or rant about blowback from the Iraq invasion, or the problems that the US faces due to our support of Israel - I would have told them to stuff it. They don’t get to decide which facts to include.
She teaches on sexuality, and in truth Trump’s campaign did not seem to be very warm to people on the LGBT side of the house. It was proven by dumping the bathroom executive order, BTW. So I would argue that the content was relevant, but her rant was unprofessional.
Was she ranting inappropriately by singling out Trump Voters (and supposedly asking them to all identify themselves)? Yes.
Her militancy is irrelevant. She acted out in a classroom, the student violated the school’s rules by recording. Should have been a short conversation and a cup of coffee and move on.