How a Student Got Kicked Out of Class — and Became a Conservative Hero

Charlie Kirk showed up dressed for the occasion.

Kirk — the head of Turning Point USA, a conservative political-advocacy group — took the stage this spring at Indiana University of Pennsylvania wearing a navy-blue T-shirt that read: “There are only two genders.”

The rural state university, in a former coal-mining town, had become one of the latest battlegrounds in the nation’s culture wars. A senior there, Lake Ingle, told conservative media outlets he had been kicked out of a religious-studies class because he argued that only two genders exist. His professor said it was his disruptive behavior, not any debate over the number of genders, that was the problem.

The battle became a national news story. “College student kicked out of class for telling professor there are only two genders,” proclaimed Fox News. Ingle gave interviews, too, to alt-right outlets such as Red Ice TV, a YouTube channel hosted by the “pro-European” white nationalist Henrik Palmgren.

What happened in one classroom made a student into a right-wing hero, and turned the professor into a target. It’s a fresh lesson in the power of the conservative media to shape the free-speech debate on campuses, and how that debate can challenge the core academic mission of colleges and universities. At what point does a heated exchange become disrespect? And who gets to decide?

Kirk began his speech at the university by calling Lake Ingle “amazing.”

“Thank you for what you’re doing,” Kirk told him from the stage. “Free speech is under attack in college campuses, it really is.”

The media narrative of Ingle’s case, particularly at conservative outlets, focused on his removal from the class — and, potentially, the delay of his graduation — because he’d said there were only two genders. But there is more nuance in the details of the February 28 incident; even in Ingle’s version of what happened, gender is only one of several subjects he discussed.

Students in the religious-studies class, “Self, Sin, and Salvation,” had just watched a Ted Talk video of a transgender minister who spoke about how she had become more aware of the obstacles faced by women once she outwardly expressed herself as a woman. The minister also spoke about the delicate process of gaining some acceptance from her conservative Christian family.

The video served as a contrast to a more-conservative view of Christianity, evangelicalism, which had been highlighted in the previous class.

Lake Ingle, a religious-studies major, missed that class. But after the Ted Talk video, he was eager to voice his objections to the transgender minister’s opinions that “mansplaining” is widespread and women “work twice as hard for half as much.”

The only problem: Alison Downie, the professor, asked female students to share their reaction to the video first. Some seconds passed. No female student spoke up.

So Ingle, who is generally outspoken in class, jumped in. He didn’t think it was right that male students should wait, no matter what the professor had said.

“She asked me to stop talking because I was a man, and I told her that she was in no position to do so,” Ingle said in an interview. To back down in that moment, he said, would have been “kneeling to the stupidity of that sort of structured conversation.”

Ingle described his tone of voice as impassioned, not shouting.

One of Ingle’s classmates, Kate Bradshaw, said Ingle’s voice was definitely raised. Not quite shouting, she said, but the elevated voice of someone seeking attention from 25 feet away.

Except the professor was not 25 feet away, Bradshaw said. She was right next to Ingle.

“Animated, rude, and I guess passionate” is how Bradshaw, who calls herself “center-left” politically, described Ingle’s behavior. “He got red in the face. He was emotionally invested in this.”

Ingle talked for several minutes. He disputed the professor’s right to allow female students to speak first. He argued that the male-female wage gap was not fueled by discrimination. At one point he veered into his stance on transgender issues.

It was during that phase of Ingle’s remarks that one student quietly walked out. Although it wasn’t obvious to some people in the classroom, that student is transgender. The student never came back.

Ingle said he wasn’t aware he had a transgender classmate. “You have to be willing to hear things that might attack your identity,” he said in an interview, including when you are a white male, as he is.

“I’ve been forced to, I have no choice,” he said. “I’ve never darted out of a classroom.”

Nonetheless, he added a minute later, “I would feel terrible if that was what caused them to leave, or to feel that they couldn’t return to class.”

In March, the university’s Academic Integrity Board held a hearing on whether Ingle should be permanently removed from the course. University policy considers it to be “classroom misconduct” if a student “significantly disrupts the learning process or is a threat to others.”

One of Ingle’s classmates, Jon Mabon, spoke in support of Ingle, saying he should be allowed to stay.

Mabon, who said he leans conservative in his political beliefs, told The Chronicle that he didn’t agree with all of Ingle’s viewpoints during his heated back-and-forth with Downie. But Mabon stressed that Downie’s course is discussion-based, and he cited a line in the syllabus that spells out that emphasis:

“Learning is an active, sometimes downright uncomfortable and difficult process which requires sustained, committed involvement in a supportive, (and, I hope fun) respectful atmosphere … in my view, if a course (or research) is not challenging, even disruptive in some ways, it is not likely to be particularly rewarding.”

Downie, in an interview, had this to say about the syllabus language: “Disruption is not the same as disrespect. Disruptive, when I said that a course or research might be challenging, even disruptive in some ways, I was not talking about disrespect. I was talking about listening to points of view.”

Were it not for Ingle’s alleged misconduct, the course’s modest requirements, also laid out in the syllabus, suggest he had a good chance of passing: A quarter of the grade was based on a midterm exam whose questions the students knew in advance, a quarter was based on a take-home final exam, a quarter was based on class attendance and the completion of 14 reading guides for assigned readings, and a quarter was based on a project to be presented to the class.

Mabon noted that Ingle was scheduled to graduate in May, and being kicked out of the course would delay that. To Mabon, such a penalty seemed excessive. Both Downie and Ingle, he said, could have handled their classroom clash better.

The professor, he said, could have let Ingle speak his piece and then taken him aside after class to talk out their differences.

Instead, the next day, Downie wrote Ingle up for a behavior violation and told him he would need to apologize in front of the class and then “listen in silence as the professor and/or any student who wishes to speak shares how he or she felt during Lake’s disrespectful and disruptive outbursts.”

Ingle refused, took his story to right-wing media outlets, and created a firestorm.

But what about Ingle’s behavior on that day? Does his supportive classmate think he should have done anything differently?

“He probably could have taken a couple deep breaths,” Mabon said.

The disciplinary hearing ended up being irrelevant. The publicity Ingle generated for his cause led to a public outcry over a student who was allegedly being punished for saying there were only “two genders.”

Michael A. Driscoll, the university’s president, opted to allow Ingle to return to the class.

In an email to the campus, Driscoll wrote that he knew he could be criticized for departing from standard procedure by bypassing Ingle’s disciplinary hearing. But, he said, “in matters that involve the fundamental values of IUP such as open discussion, civil dialogue, and reasoned disagreement in the service of learning, I will take the risks rather than rest on the safe but ‘foolish consistency that is the hobgoblin of little minds.’”

Email records obtained by The Chronicle show that Driscoll closely monitored news coverage of the Ingle controversy, even compiling and distributing article links to his colleagues.

The emails also show that public anger about the Ingle case spilled over to parts of the university that had nothing to do with it.

“We have received one email and our first obscene phone call,” the director of women’s and gender studies wrote to the provost in March. “I thought you should be aware that the ‘2 genders’ issue has spread beyond Religious Studies.”

It was Downie, however, who bore the brunt of the outrage. There were harassing phone calls and text messages, some quoting Bible verses. She received about 1,000 emails, including some with anti-Semitic language.

Anonymous online forums called for her to be shot or raped. On one message board, a commenter posted pictures of her home and its address. Security was beefed up on the campus, and her office hours were no longer publicly posted.

The student’s supporters combed through the professor’s writings and identified examples of what they saw as her “leftist” bias. “As you can see, she’s an unhinged, man-hating shrew,” wrote one conservative website. A reader of that site called the cops on Downie, alleging she was a dangerous threat (the police quickly determined she was not).

An online petition, demanding that Downie be fired, drew more than 1,500 signatures. Downie, who only recently had earned tenure as an associate professor, changed her cellphone number and deleted her personal Facebook account.

The editorial board of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 50 miles west of Indiana, Pa., weighed in.

“Colleges, universities, and the faculty and administrators who staff them have a sacred duty: To cherish, nourish, and protect free speech and academic freedom, and foster a love of these two great freedoms in the minds and hearts of students,” the newspaper wrote. “Indiana University of Pennsylvania and assistant professor Alison Downie have failed in this duty, by seeking to punish a student for expressing his views on gender identities.”

Ingle’s version of events dominated the public narrative in part because of his media savvy — but also because Downie’s defenders, and the professor herself, were largely silent at first. Downie, who declined to answer some questions from The Chronicle, was partly hamstrung by federal student-privacy laws, which, in her opinion, limited what she could say about the case.

“Unlike students, I am bound by Ferpa law [the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act], which mandates that I cannot speak about any particular student behavior or classroom session,” Downie wrote in the student newspaper. Instead, she offered a more-general rebuttal.

“Stories circulating in various social media and internet sites about a course I am teaching have presented a one-sided narrative,” she wrote. “The most widely circulated stories are full of inaccuracies, misrepresentations, and outright fabrication.”

A day after her piece was published, in April, the department chairs and deans in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences released a statement defending Downie. They called her an “award-winning instructor” who had “suffered a barrage of unjust and ill-informed attacks.”

Ingle said some of the threats against his professor had been “dark” and “pretty twisted.” But he said he had taken his case to the media only because he’d been warned by his lawyers that if a university wanted you to lose a disciplinary hearing, you’d lose. And his graduation was on the line.

“I felt I had no choice,” he said, “but to look for help from other people.”

Even if there had never been a student named Lake Ingle, it’s possible that Charlie Kirk would still have appeared here wearing a “there are only two genders” T-shirt. Pushing back against society’s shifting definitions of gender has become a common conservative rallying cry.

At Kirk’s event, it was clear that the Turning Point USA leader viewed the transgender debate in political terms. He mocked Bill Nye, the science television star, for his view that gender is a spectrum, saying that Nye had become a “puppet for the liberals.”

When the transgender issue came up — and it came up repeatedly — there was a palpable air of contempt in the room.

“Back to this whole gender thing,” Kirk said at the half-hour mark. “Just because you believe something or you feel something does not make it true.”

Nearly an hour later, when Kirk talked about how he respected the right of socialists to their beliefs, a man in the crowd blurted out: “What if you want to sexually identify as a cat?”

“If you want to, that’s fine, just don’t tell me to call you a cat,” Kirk responded, prompting scattered laughter.

The audience of mostly students, roughly 200 people, was also fiercely loyal to Ingle. During a question-and-answer session, a student-newspaper reporter asked Ingle about the criticism from some of his classmates that his behavior on that fateful day had been disruptive, and part of a larger pattern of disruption.

Ingle responded: “They might just disagree with me ideologically, similar to how the professor does. And then took steps to defame me in defense of their ideologies. That’s what I think.”

The room erupted in applause. After the event concluded, Ingle told a reporter that the night felt “very validating, and very loving.”

“It’s nice to be accepted by people,” he said.

Graduating on time had been one of Ingle’s main goals for waging such a public battle to get back into Downie’s classroom.

But when asked recently about his academic standing, Ingle at first said he hadn’t looked at his final grades, even though they had been released five days earlier.

He then said he needed to take a religious-studies course online to graduate in August. When asked directly if he had failed Downie’s course, he replied: “I really don’t want to share that information.”

A month after Kirk’s speech, in the same corner of the campus — the Kovalchick Convention and Athletic Complex — graduates walked across the stage during the spring commencement. Ingle wasn’t among them.

Michael Vasquez is a senior investigative reporter. Follow him on Twitter @MrMikeVasquez, or email him at michael.vasquez@chronicle.com.