I’D LIKE TO SEE MORE UNIVERSITIES STANDING UP TO THESE FRIVOLOUS COMPLAINTS: Mary Washington President Says Feminist Group’s Title IX Complaint Is Reckless, Misinformed. And he’s right.

University of Mary Washington president Richard Hurley had harsh words for the national feminist legal organization sponsoring a Title IX complaint against the university. The complaint is based on “unsubstantiated claims and misinformation,” wrote Hurley in a blunt and harshly condemning open letter.

A small UMW campus organization, Feminists United on Campus, filed the complaint with the help of the Feminist Majority Foundation, a national advocacy group. They allege that the university failed to protect members of FUC from harassment and cyberbullying—particularly anonymous threats made using the social media app, Yik Yak. One of the members of the group, Grace Mann, was tragically murdered in her off-campus home a few weeks ago. Her apparent killer, roommate Steven Vander Briel, was apprehended immediately.

The complaint implicitly draws a connection between FUC’s anti-sexism activism—which targeted the rugby team because a few members engaged in nonspecifically offensive chanting at a party—the threats made against the group, and Mann’s eventual death. (Vander Briel, an on-again, off-again student who had recently re-enrolled, was a former member of the rugby team, though there is no record of him having played a game for nearly the last decade, and the current members of the team didn’t know him.)

I previously wrote that the complaint was baseless; there’s no evidence that the rugby team, or the Yik Yak comments (which are constitutionally-protected speech), had anything to do with Mann’s death. Furthermore, the university did everything it could for FUC. Administrators, including Hurley himself, met with FUC constantly to assuage its concerns.

Given all that, Hurley’s criticism of FUC and FMF is well-deserved.

As I’ve said, these “activists” aren’t well-meaning people who sometimes go a little overboard. They’re nasty, awful people abusing legal channels to exercise tyranny over those who don’t follow orders. And they hate Yik Yak on campus because it lets people end-run the censors.