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Friday, July 6, 2012

Did this "Human Sexuality" class amount to sexual harassment of the "hostile environment" kind?

A new lawsuit by a 60-year-old student, who dropped the class that required the students to write weekly journal entries about their sexual thoughts and practices.
According to the complaint, during the fourth week of class, the journal entry of student sitting next to Royce was discussed in detail....

The complaint contains plenty of other instances of such classroom occurrences (including Kubistant requiring students to masturbate “twice as often” and to journal about it).
The teacher had students sign a waiver at the beginning of the course, and Royce signed, but we're not seeing the text of the waiver. How far would you go in allowing teachers to use waivers to avoid liability in situations like this? Aside from the waiver, do you think what this teacher did should be dealt with through a lawsuit? Would you like to see this teacher stopped from teaching the class as he does (through some means other than a lawsuit)? Do you accept this approach to teaching the class as within the teacher's academic freedom? Do you want to know more about the facts, such as the tone of voice and the inflection that the teacher used when reading the students' journal entries out loud?

I got to that link via Above The Law, which makes much of the waiver and takes a flippant attitude toward the not-young woman:  "It’s kind of sad that she’s evidently made it all the way to 60 without reading the stuff she signs." If that's sad, you must be really, really sad. I'll bet you clicked yes without reading to at least 10 things in the last year, trusting the source — e.g., your school — and figuring that other people are making sure that there's nothing bizarre in it and that if there were anything bizarre, it would never be enforced.

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