Wesleyan University is denying that the school has any legal responsibility for flyers posted on its campus by anonymous students suggesting three professors were sexual predators.
One of the tenured professors, Michael McAlear, filed a lawsuit against the Connecticut university in May, seeking damages for what he called "defamation." By not intervening, he argued, the school made itself responsible for its students’ actions. Back in 2016, students started posting flyers that read, “Reject Sexual Predators Emboldened by Institutional Power,” with McAlear’s name and face underneath, along with two other professors.
McAlear says he’s never been accused of any sort of sexual misconduct, and that he was only labeled a “sexual predator” because he confronted student protesters.
On Thursday, Wesleyan flatly denied McAlear’s claims in a motion filed with the Connecticut Superior Court. The school argues that many of McAlear’s allegations are invalid because, in Connecticut, negligence and related claims only apply to termination cases, and McAlear still has his job.
McAlear updated his complaint in early June to include "defamation per se" after an Ohio court found Oberlin College responsible for defamation over student protests against a local bakery. But, Wesleyan says, McAlear doesn’t try to establish that anyone working for Wesleyan defamed him: it was students, acting independently. In the Oberlin case, the dean of students participated in the protests.
Adam Steinbaugh, at the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said, “Wesleyan’s response is to say, ‘Look, the students are not our agents. We don’t employ them, they are not acting on our behalf, we are not responsible for what they say. Therefore, you can’t hold us responsible for what a student says about you.”
Steinbaugh says that efforts by a university to assert control over student speech could backfire because people will "try to make the university responsible for the students. And that's going to have a deleterious effect, or a chilling effect, on campus discourse.”
The ruling against Oberlin, Steinbaugh distinguished, hinged on the dean's participation.
“I think that is different. An administrator is someone that the university can control and say, ‘You are acting on our behalf, therefore what you do, we are responsible for,’" said Steinbaugh. "That is very much different than a student who the administration is not supposed to be able to control.”
Wesleyan declined to comment and McAlear did not respond to a request for comment.
Hannah Reale is an intern with the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news center based at WGBH News.
