An administrator at Michigan Technological University is laboring under the impression that Title IX takes legal precedence over the United States Constitution. He also believes students violate Title IX when they make raunchy jokes about sexual harassment.
The administrator is Les Cook, the president for student affairs at Michigan Tech, a taxpayer-funded public school with an ugly campus in the frozen tundra of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Cook made his odd claim about the supremacy of Title IX earlier this month as he attempted to justify Michigan Tech’s decision to place The Daily Bull, a satirical student publication, on probation for two years.
The Daily Bull’s crime was to run a vulgar, sophomoric story with the headline “Sexually Harassed Man Pretty Okay with Situation,” reports The College Fix.
Cook’s comically wrong understanding of American law led him to declare that Title IX — a 1972 federal law prohibiting sex discrimination by schools — compelled state employees at Michigan Tech to punish students editors the The Daily Bill for exercising their rights to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
“(The Constitution) doesn’t supersede it,” Cook told Michigan Tech’s Daily Mining Gazette. “Title IX is a federal compliance policy. Those policies supersede anything else.”
Free speech advocate Peter Bonilla of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) called out Cook’s shockingly poor understanding of U.S. constitutional mechanics.
Attn @michigantech students: Your admins think #TitleIX trumps the Constitution. Be afraid. https://t.co/oJjlGjG8oP pic.twitter.com/aIqcT2jTzj
— Peter Bonilla (@pebonilla) December 10, 2015
Bonilla also criticized the editors of The Daily Bull for meekly acquiescing to their punishment for speaking freely in a newspaper.
A shame the Daily Bull agreed to such a clearly unconstitutional punishment by @michigantech. No grounds for it. https://t.co/oJjlGjG8oP
— Peter Bonilla (@pebonilla) December 10, 2015
Michigan Tech’s student government is also mandating political re-education for the staffers of The Daily Bull. The student government has pulled a substantial amount of the publication’s funding and will “withhold more until Bull staff members had attended Title IX training on sexual discrimination,” the Fix reports.
Article VI of the U.S. Constitution concisely explains that the Constitution is the highest law of the land, and that federal law — such as Title IX — must adhere to the founding document.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution very clearly states that the federal government cannot make any law prohibiting free speech or restricting the free press. (The 14th Amendment has consistently been held to extend these limitations to state governments.)
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