Dozens of Harvard Students Filed Title IX Complaints Accusing Kavanaugh of 'Sexual Harassment' If He Returned to Campus

Brittany M. Hughes | October 3, 2018
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Yesterday, I wrote that Harvard Law had canceled Brett Kavanaugh’s decade-long class on Supreme Court history after “pressure from students and alumni” forced him to withdraw from teaching the course he’d headed up since 2008. But it turns out that “pressure” was even worse – and even dumber – than I’d thought.

First, the Harvard Undergraduate Council demanded university officials open an investigation into the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh before allowing him to return to teaching at the law school. And the insanity didn't end there.

According to The Harvard Crimson, Harvard’s campus newspaper, a group of nearly 50 students – students presumably studying the law, mind you – signed an online pledge to file Title IX complaints alleging that Kavanaugh’s mere presence on campus would constitute “sexual and gender-based harassment.” Title IX is a provision in federal law that allows individuals to report allegations of sex-based discrimination.

The paper reports, in its own words:

Over the past week, several students filed formal complaints alleging Kavanaugh’s presence in Cambridge would violate Harvard’s policy prohibiting sexual and gender-based harassment — though several Title IX experts said this strategy was unlikely to succeed.

The petition was launched by a student named Jacqueline Kellogg, who herself filed a complaint against Kavanaugh with the University’s Office for Dispute Resolution. Soon after, she began urging other students to file complaints with the ODR accusing Kavanaugh of committing sexual harassment should he step foot back on campus.

“I hope that, as students file these complaints and engage with this process of singling out accusers and harassers on campus, that it actually can be seen that this process is a little less formidable than the reputation of the process is on campus,” Kellogg said.

Julia Wiener, another student who signed the petition and filed a complaint, claimed Kavanaugh’s presence “would be pretty terrifying for any survivor or any person to walk into a building on campus and see someone who has been alleged of a very serious crime.”

Thankfully, at least one person in this bastion of liberalism had at least half a brain. Harvard Law Professor Janet Halley, an expert on Title IX law, called the whole scheme “implausible.”

“I urge the students to divert their energy from this implausible claim that he’s going to create a sexually hostile environment by teaching at the Law School to the really grand issue of whether he’s fit to be in his current judgeship or promoted to the Supreme Court,” Halley said.

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