Orange Coast College, a community college in California, has suspended a student for filming a faculty member who expressed anti-Trump sentiments in class last year, The Orange County Register reports.
The student, Caleb O’Neil, filmed his psychology instructor, Olga Perez Stable Cox, making comments about President Trump’s election during her human-sexuality class. In the video, Ms. Cox, who has taught at the college for more than 40 years, can be heard voicing concern about antigay sentiments expressed by Mr. Trump’s supporters. She described the election results as an “act of terrorism” and said that “the people committing the assault are among us.”
The newspaper reports that Mr. O’Neil took the video to his College Republicans group, whose members complained about the faculty member’s comments to the college’s administration. The group posted videos of the comments to YouTube in December.
The recordings went viral and resulted in an avalanche of threatening messages to Ms. Cox, 66, who was forced to flee her home and leave the state. In an interview with the Register, she said her comments represented her attempt to comfort students upset by the election results.
The college has suspended Mr. O’Neil for two semesters, and asked him to write a letter of apology as well as a three-page essay about the incident. The newspaper reports that the college levied the punishment because the student didn’t get the instructor’s permission to film her.
Speaking to the newspaper, William Becker, a lawyer representing Mr. O’Neil, said that the college’s response was “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.”