The Graduate Student Union at New York University has demanded that the college fire the professor that it rehired after being suspended for sexual harassment in violation of Title IX.

Graduate Students Want Title IX Violator Fired Rather than Suspended

We have covered the situation in our blog before. After suspending prominent feminist and literature scholar Avital Ronell for a year for sexually harassing a former graduate student, NYU rehired Professor Ronell. We predicted that the rehiring would trigger advocates for sexual assault victims.

Now, 192 students have signed a petition circulated by NYU's Graduate Student Organizing Committee, calling for the college to fire Professor Ronell.

Their petition claims that NYU's rehiring of Professor Ronell “constitutes an attack on survivors of sexual abuse and contributes to a hostile learning and working environment.” It also, confusingly, claims that NYU's decision to supervise Professor Ronell's future meetings with students is proof that the school knows that it should not have rehired Professor Ronell.

The Numerous Problems With the Graduate Students' Demands

That graduate students are trying to get a prominent and influential professor fired from their school shows how much higher education has changed in the U.S. The support that they are using for their claims, though, is illogical and weak.

First, the fact that graduate students are trying to oust such a prominent, accomplished, and decorated professor from their school is self-defeating. Colleges aim to fill their faculty with figures like Professor Ronell and students, especially graduate students, choose where to go for their advanced degrees based on those faculty members. Firing someone like Professor Ronell would weaken the very program that attracts graduate students to NYU. That might be why only four of the 192 signatories to the demands come from the NYU programs that Professor Ronell teaches in. The vast majority of the people calling for her firing have no interest in the programs she is a part of.

Second, this is a classic example of ex post facto law – one that changes the punishment for past deeds based on current attitudes and whims. Making sanctioning decisions ex post facto is almost guaranteed to create chaos and be unfair.

Third, the Graduate Student Union tries to spin NYU's probationary measures against Professor Ronell as a reason to fire her, outright. But claiming that NYU's attempt to keep Professor Ronell in line is actually proof that she should be fired insinuates that NYU would have been better off not supervising her student meetings. Of course, if NYU had not vowed to supervise Professor Ronell's student meetings, the Graduate Student Union would certainly have protested, anyway.

Finally, spokespeople for the Union demand that NYU become “one of the leaders in changing the system” that creates a dangerous power imbalance between professors and students, where professors have an outsized influence over the career trajectories of their pupils. How that would change, though, is unclear and likely impossible – the whole concept of education is based on a hierarchy between instructors who are knowledgeable and students who learn from them. Demanding that NYU take the lead in dismantling this basic structure is, at best, confusing.

Joseph D. Lento: Title IX Advisor and Defense Attorney

Joseph D. Lento is a national Title IX advisor and defense attorney. Contact him online or call his law office at (888) 535-3686 if you have been accused of sexual misconduct on campus.