LSU Professor’s Lawsuit Could Undermine Major Obama Title IX Policy

From The Daily Caller:

A fired Louisiana State University (LSU) professor has filed a lawsuit that could gut the Obama administration’s controversial guidelines on what constitutes campus sexual harassment.

Teresa Buchanan, a tenured education professor, was fired by LSU in June 2015, roughly a year after school officials claimed that unspecified “inappropriate comments” she had made in the classroom violated the school’s sexual harassment policy. Colleges are obliged to punish sexual harassment under the federal government’s Title IX law, which allows for schools to lose all federal funding if they are found to have created or tolerated a hostile sexual environment on campus.
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But Buchanan’s lawsuit is about more than her job or her personal freedom of speech. It also threatens to bring down a major part of President Obama’s Title IX policy.

As noted by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which is supporting Buchanan’s lawsuit, the sexual harassment definition LSU used to fire Buchanan uses language identical to one the Department of Education has urged U.S. colleges to adopt since 2013. The definition classifies sexual harassment as any “unwelcome verbal, visual, or physical behavior of a sexual nature.”

FIRE argues that the department’s definition is “breathtakingly broad” and amounts to an effort to force unconstitutional speech codes onto any college receiving federal money. Just about any speech of a remotely sexual nature, the group argues, could potentially be treated as harassment.

When defending its decision to fire Buchanan, LSU has explicitly claimed it is only following the guidance of the Department of Education.

Punch back twice as hard.