Over the past few days walking around New York City I have begun to notice graduates of Columbia University. It seems like it is that time of year again where college kids actually go out into the real world. No more safe spaces, trigger warnings, Title IX kangaroo courts and no more walking around with mattresses for college credit. All of that stuff is in the past and these kids are supposedly ready to enter real world.
I wonder how the “Mattress Girl” Emma Sulkowicz is holding up. Is she still making porn videos? Is she still holding onto her mattress?
Well, what I do know is that the dude who had to deal with the fallout from having sex with her isn’t giving up his fight. If my son were to ever go through what he went through, I’d be in court making sure someone pays for the nonsense he dealt with.
Just in case you didn’t know about Emma, she was a Columbia University student who accused her classmate Paul Nungesser of raping her in 2012. The university found him “not responsible” in a Title IX investigation. She eventually protested the decision by carrying around her mattress around the campus as part of a so-called “art project” titled Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). She insisted on doing so until Paul was no longer on campus.
For some bizarre reason, she actually received academic credit for it. Paul maintained his innocence and later filed a lawsuit against Columbia, its president, Lee Bollinger, its trustees and art professor Jon Kessler in April of 2015. He alleged that the school violated Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education.
The lawsuit was dismissed but he has filed a new suit claiming that since Columbia permitted Emma to publicly protest, even after they found him “not responsible” for sexual misconduct, the school violated his rights under Title IX but with a new complaint.
In a recent Newsweek article, they reported that Nungesser filed a new 100 page complaint stating that he was discriminated against because he is male. His complaint:
“urges the judge to consider “the case at hand if the genders were reversed,” and then proposes a scenario involving people named Paula and Emmet, with details mirroring what happened between Nungesser and Sulkowicz.
The new complaint also alleges that Columbia’s policies and practices “perpetuate the stereotype of the sex-driven male,” which violates Title IX. For example, the complaint says, Columbia’s policies include no examples of sexual violence involving a male victim and a female perpetrator, only female victims and male perpetrators, or gender-neutral victims and perpetrators.
Also, it says, all videos shown during a mandatory sexual respect program for students focused on “violence against women” and not gender-based violence more generally.
Further, the complaint alleges, the school’s sexual violence policies focus only on penetration as opposed to someone being “made to penetrate.”
I feel it is time for men on these college campuses to keep up the fight and use the law against those who feel it is supposed to protect only women. The law was written gender neutral and if there is discrimination in any form against any sex, the law has been violated.
Male students’ recent lawsuits against colleges have begun to gain some traction in recent months. There are cases in Washington and Lee University as well as Brown.
We’ll see what happens. I wish Mr. Nungesser well and hope that Emma isn’t living in the college fantasy world anymore. It’s time to end the madness on college campuses and we need to stamp out the government overreach and ideological fanaticism. It has gotten completely out of hand.
