Fired LSU prof sues over Obama-approved speech code

President Obama and Former Attorney General Eric Holder

A fired professor has filed a federal lawsuit against Louisiana State University and administrators that traces back to arbitrarily changes in court-approved sex-assault standards by former Attorney General Eric Holder.

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Teresa Buchanan was a tenured associate professor at LSU with 20 years experience. That came to an end during the Spring 2014 semester over complaints about her teaching style, which then snowballed into charges of  violating the university’s sexual harassment policy. There was just one problem: No-one ever accused her of sexual harassment.

The Department of Justice under Holder changed the Office for Civil Rights' definition of sexual harassment in 2013 to "any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" from "[environments] so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim's access to an educational opportunity or benefit." The change made it possible for universities to level charges of sexual harassment over legitimate classroom conversations.

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Buchanan, who instructed future educators in a Baton Rouge prekindergarten through third-grade teacher certification program, said she sometimes used sexual language to prepare students for discussions with "children from family backgrounds that are different from their own." LSU's Board of Supervisors never showed her unspecified allegations of "inappropriate comments" before her termination.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an education watchdog, is now sponsoring Buchanan’s lawsuit. FIRE has taken on 11 similar cases on behalf of free speech in higher education.

See what American education has become, in “Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America’s Children.”

"FIRE predicted that universities would silence and punish faculty by using the Department of Education’s unconstitutional definition of sexual harassment—and that’s exactly what happened at LSU," FIRE Director of Litigation Catherine Sevcenko said Thursday. "Under this broad definition of sexual harassment, professors risk punishment for teaching or discussing sex-related material, be it Nabokov’s Lolita or the latest episode of The Bachelor. Now Teresa is fighting back to protect her rights and the rights of her colleagues."

LSU released a statement on Buchanan's termination in Sept. 1, 2015, saying her behavior was a possible violation of "the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ advisements [sic]."

"The evidence, as ascertained by a faculty hearing committee and university administrators, students and other faculty, is that over the course of several years, the faculty member had berated, embarrassed, disparaged, maligned and denigrated young, primarily female students who aspired to become elementary school teachers," the statement read.