HYPOCRISY AT TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
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A Temple professor of Military history said of DeJohn, veterans are “mentally imbalanced” because we are “trained to kill,” quite an unusual attitude for a professor of military history.
Christian DeJohn, a former Temple graduate student and sergeant in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, won a lawsuit against the University so-called ‘speech code’ when the 3rd District Court of Appeals ruled it unconstitutional.
DeJohn said he was refused a graduate degree based on his political views. He said he received anti-war e-mails from Temple faculty while deployed in Bosnia during 2002, when he asked that the emails be stopped that led to political disputes with his graduate advisers and those disputes, he said, led to his being denied his graduate degree and other retaliation and degradation, for instance:
The University denied wrong doing saying, “His academic performance just wasn’t good enough, It had nothing to do with his First Amendment rights and had everything to do with Temple professors’ academic freedom to grade a student’s poorly written, poorly constructed … thesis.”
The Court agreed defended Temple University upholding the university’s academic freedom to evaluate his performance as a student. Those claims were not part of the Third Circuit appeal. But, it found for DeJohn awarding him one dollar damages on his original complaints.
FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and ADF (Alliance Defense Fund) won the case for DeJohn challenging the constitutionality of a sexual harassment policy that, in part, penalized “expressive, visual or physical conduct … (that) has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work, educational performance or status, or … has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment.” DeJohn claimed that because of the code, he felt unable to freely express his views about the role of women in the military. That ran him afoul of University professors and advisers.
His was a pyrrhic victory leaving him absent a time consuming and costly graduate degree. Temple has changed its so-called “speech code” –I wonder about its hypocrisy.