“An Amherst College student who last month wrote an op-ed for his student paper criticizing DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — initiatives dealt with harassment, a death threat, and incurred the wrath of the school’s Title IX office,” reports The College Fix:
In The Amherst Student, Jeb Allen criticized progressives’ stances on topics such as biological differences, “race over merit,” and the “inconsistency” between intentions and actual results.
“To our campus’s detriment, conversations critiquing them are rare, especially from a conservative standpoint,” Allen wrote. “Rather than addressing the roots of inequality within American society, we have accepted ineffective, performative gestures that give a false appearance of growth, but instead reinforce damaging stereotypes that minorities are incapable of doing as good a job.”
To help make his case, Allen pointed to some wacky statements discovered during the Los Angeles-area wildfires, such as “want[ing] to see someone that looks like you” when you call 911, and a female firefighter stating if you think a woman can’t carry a man out of a burning building, you need to ask how “he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”….
Allen also was slapped with a “No-Communications & Restricted Proximity Order” by the Amherst Title IX office due to a complaint by an aggrieved female student with whom Allen had never spoken.
According to Allen, this same student previously had argued the Amherst football team merely looking at her public Instagram post constituted “harassment” and was “indicative of ‘white fragility.’”
The Title IX office at one point told Allen he “potentially violated” the order by “non-verbally making [him]self present” at the same dining hall as the student who filed the complaint.
This is not the only case where no-contact orders were used to chill students’ speech. In 2024, George Mason University censored two female students, ordering them not to talk to a peer who wanted “feminine hygiene products” to be put in men’s bathrooms. The University dropped the no-contact order two months later after they brought a First Amendment lawsuit.
In 2022, Christian law students and a professor sued the University of Idaho after the university served them with no-contact orders for expressing their support of Biblical marriage between a man and woman. The lawsuit was settled with the university for $90,000 after the court issued a preliminary injunction against the university. Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) represented the students in that case.
In a similar case, ADF attorneys successfully defended a graduate student at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville after the school punished her with no-contact orders for sharing her religious beliefs with other students on social media.
In addition to violating the First Amendment, imposing a no-contact order without any prior notice could also violate constitutional due-process protections, if it impacts the ability to get an education. In Tyree v. Evans, the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled that due-process rights entitled a man to not only to the opportunity to defend himself against domestic violence charges before a year-long no-contact order could be granted to his accuser, but also the ability to cross-examine her, before the court could impose the order against him.
Off campus, no-contact orders can sometimes violate the First Amendment rule against prior restraints, as a federal appeals court ruled in Alberti v. Cruise (1967).
