Education

BRANDEIS DAYCARE: Now $60,300 College Restricts Student Journalist’s Movement

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Daniel Mael, the Brandeis University student who publicly cited another student’s public tweets expressing “no sympathy” for two brutally murdered New York City police officers, has been slapped with a “no contact order” limiting his movement on campus.

The “no contact order” has prevented Mael, a senior one semester shy of graduation, from existing anywhere near a second student on Brandeis’s genteel suburban Boston campus.

“My movement on campus has been restricted because I wrote an article,” Mael told The Washington Free Beacon. “And this punishment has been imposed without any due process.”

The second student is not Khadijah Lynch, the African and Afro-American studies major at Brandeis who wrote the inflammatory tweets (saying, for example, “i have no sympathy for the nypd officers who were murdered today” and “i hate this racist fucking country”).

Instead, the second student is Michael Piccione, part of a throng of angry Brandeis students who criticized Mael after he published Lynch’s tweets at the website Truth Revolt on Dec. 20, the same day the two NYPD officers were murdered execution-style.

Piccione, also a senior and a member of the 2014-15 student conduct board, sent an urgent email on Dec. 22 to the president of Brandeis, senior administrators, radical leftist professors and students. (RELATED: Students Rally Around Peer With ‘No Sympathy’ For Dead Cops)

The email — entitled “VERY IMPORTANT: Holding Daniel Mael accountable, and other threats to student safety!” — claimed that “Mael has exposed Khadijah to the largely white supremacist following of the website.” (The website to which Piccione refers is Truth Revolt.)

For reporting about Lynch’s vile tweets, Piccione declared, Mael “has potentially violated multiple parts” of a Brandeis code of student conduct including “stalking.”

“Khadijah specifically requested that her personal comments be removed from the website and the article in question taken down, but her wishes were ignored,” the student conduct board member also whined.

Lynch had threatened that she does not want her tweets “publicized in any form and if you do not abide my wishes i constitute your disregard as slander.”

Jamele Adams, dean of student life at fancypants Brandeis, imposed the “no contact order” on Dec. 23. Adams then lifted the order this week — on Jan. 8 — shortly after the Free Beacon publicized it.

Somewhat similarly, Lynch erased her entire Twitter page back in December (then set it to private, and then made it public again). (RELATED: Fancypants, College Student: ‘No Sympathy’ For Brutally Executed Cops)

While the “no contact order” was in place, Adams communicated its meaning to Mael.

“As shared when we spoke on the phone moments ago in relation to a No Contact Order, you are to have no contact with Michael Piccione in any way, shape or form,” the dean wrote, according to the Free Beacon. “Please be aware that the same applies to Michael and that he is not to have contact with you. This same information is being shared with him as well.”

But what happens if Piccione and Mael show up in the same place at the same time? Adams, an allegedly “celebrated poet,”

“In the event one party is at a location before the other, the party that was present second must await the departure of the first,” he wrote.

If either Mael of Piccione violated the order, Adams sternly warned, it “should be reported to the Dean of Students Office.”

Mael has indicated that he did not seek the “no contact order” against himself.

It is not clear if Piccione sought the draconian order, or if Adams chose to impose it unilaterally, or if someone instructed Adams to impose the order.In a closed Facebook group called “Brandeis Parents,” Andrew Flagel, senior vice president for enrollment at Brandeis, explained to Brandeis parents that “the university can only offer limited comments” about “no contact orders.”

“I need to reiterate first and foremost that they are not a punitive action and do not impact a student’s record in any way,” the bureaucrat promised. “They are not designed to restrict speech,” he argued.

While the “no contact order” was in place against Mael, Brandeis president Frederick M. Lawrence had the temerity to argue in The Wall Street Journal that the school “has an unyielding commitment to free speech and expression of ideas.”

“No student would ever be sanctioned for holding a specific point of view,” Lawrence totally promised.

In a Jan. 8 essay in TIME, Mael said of Piccione: “As far as I know, I have never spoken to this student in my time at Brandeis and would fail to pick him out of a police lineup.”

Mael also explained that campus security officials urged him to change dorm rooms and purchase mace at Walmart. They said he should expect to see his vehicle vandalized, too.

One year of tuition, mandatory fees and room and board costs about $60,300 at Brandeis (a little over $6,000 more than America’s median household income of $53,891).

In 2013, Mael was fortunate enough to retain the pro-bono services of a huge law firm, Covington & Burling, in a successful fight against a secret, kangaroo-court proceeding which resulted from a claim of “bullying, harassment, and religious discrimination” lodged by another student.

That student, Eli Philip, spoke in an agitation fashion at a campus speaker and then got his feelings hurt in a later Facebook debate with Mael, explains The Wall Street Journal.

Philip calls himself a “community organizer” on his LinkedIn page. The only previous work experience he cites is as a camp counselor. His skills include “social media” and “PowerPoint.”

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