That's what #1 was supposed to say--they keep their funding while this charade is happening.

There's no grounds in anywhere in labor law for punitive damages to somebody who undergoes an investigation. Maybe the grad student could sue for slander or something like that, but otherwise that's not even a pipe dream.

And those are just the obvious ones. What else?

3. Depending where they are in the program, their adviser (diss? exam chair? whoever) needs to clarify that any disruption in their time line is the result of this horseshit investigation and won't be held against the student.

2. Their department (chair, grad coordinator, whoever) needs to issue a "hold harmless" letter, making clear that when the investigation leads to nothing, the student won't be penalized in any way. I'm thinking about wonky stuff like missing student evals that lead to lost teaching assignments.

Dear Steelers: I wasn't sure I could like you less after erasing Ben Roethlisberger's history of sexual predation, but signing Aaron Rodgers may have done it. Also, that defender just laid one of the cheapest shots I've seen all year on Josh Allen, and that's just the kind of team this has become.

Too bad there aren't a couple of hundred Christian colleges she could attend where she'd be "safe." Oh, can't afford it? Should have made better life choices!

All OU mgmt wants is to be able to say they took the allegation seriously. Even if they don't issue discipline, they've also handed whoever cooked this up a win: the instructor is "suspended." Predictable spineless corporate legal staff thinking.

Years ago I had a super-right-wing student I could talk candidly to about politics, and we talked about this.

Him: If I could get a degree without coming here, of course I'd do it.
Me: But your degree says you learned XYZ things, and you're saying you won't learn those.
Him: (shrug) Oh well!

Opting out of definitional games, just to clarify: my point, really, is that I don't think she has a clue about how any of this is supposed to work, and right now anyone who tries to stop her from doing as she pleases is a pariah. And "activist judge" is a handy label for that.

Sure, but I bet if you asked her for her theory of power, she'd just gawp.

There's a mutual aid project to get organized here (someday) in which folks who usually buy from Amazon because they're financially captive can ask people for help getting things elsewhere. Hard to scale, but the idea isn't all that complicated. Hmm.

Yes, I know it's important to know how connected to reality people's perceptions are, but that's not how this is getting conducted or reported.

At a time when too many people dismiss even the existence of facts, treating EVERYTHING like an opinion doesn't help. It just authorizes people who say, "Well, I don't see it so I don't believe it and you can't make me" by legitimizing differences of "opinion" about things that aren't. (cont)