Shortly after the election, Orange Coast Community College professor Olga Perez Stable Cox launched into a tirade during her class on human sexuality, calling Donald Trump a “white supremacist” and Mike Pence “one of the most anti-gay humans in this country.”
While it’s unlikely she was the only professor to make such statements, she did have the misfortune of being recorded by a student who was less than appreciative of her behavior.
OCCC claims they’ve launched an investigation. However, their target seems to be students, and not the professor.
They are posting signs warning students not to record instructors without permission:
Almost two months after a secretly recorded video of an Orange Coast College professor’s post-election comments about President Trump touched off a nationwide firestorm, signs reminding students that in-class recordings are prohibited without instructors’ permission have been posted in Orange Coast classrooms for the spring semester, which started last week.
The signs read: “Video and/or audio recording without instructor permission is prohibited.”
At the bottom, the signs cite the Coast Community College District’s Student Code of Conduct and the California Education Code, which prohibit recordings without permission.
The college president argues that the signs are for protecting teachers from having words taken out of context, but not everyone is buying that excuse:
Joshua Recalde-Martinez, president emeritus of the Orange Coast College Republicans club, which posted the video on its Facebook page in December, said he considers the signs to be “a slap in the face of students.”
“One of the things it’s doing is suppressing students from reporting faculty wrongdoing,” he said. “Another is producing a huge inconvenience to those who otherwise regularly record classes.”
There is little doubt that academia has a strong leftist bias, so it seems far more likely that such a policy is designed to protect professors from criticism by the public at large. As Recalde-Martinez notes, it’s difficult for students to report wrongdoing without evidence: it boils down to “he said, she said,” and the conservative student isn’t likely to win that battle.
While there may be an ongoing investigation into Professor Cox’s conduct, it’s unlikely to have happened without a recording of her rant. The school’s decision to post signs reminding students to not record without permission seems more of an effort to further weaken the influence of opposing points of view on campus than anything else.
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