Purdue calls for apology, none coming for rape comment
Purdue attorney calls for "full apology"; students plan rally Monday.
As hope faded at Purdue University that an internal police investigation and backhanded exoneration would make complaints go away about a staffer accused of posting social media threats of rape on pro-life sites, university officials doubled down at the end of a hectic week.
By Friday evening, with howling national conservative bloggers calling out Purdue and incensed parents and alumni firing away on administrative offices, the university’s attorney pulled no punches on Jamie Newman, the man at the center of the controversy.
The upshot: Only the university’s free speech policy had saved the piano accompanist’s job in the Purdue Division of Dance. Beyond that? Steve Schultz, Purdue’s attorney, didn’t hold back, giving a peek behind the curtain of the chaos of the week in the process.
“The disruption we’ve endured as a community is entirely due to Mr. Newman’s online posts,” Schultz said Friday evening. “Anything other than a full apology and explanation from him about the intent of his statement will be insufficient to cure the harm he’s done.”
After wincing a day earlier when confronted with complaints about posts campus officials called “repugnant and inconsistent with Purdue values,” was the statement just Purdue’s latest attempt to save face in a situation where an employee’s social media handiwork had put the university over the barrel?
Because, let’s face it, a free-speech-or-bust Purdue is definitely over a barrel on this one.
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Newman earlier this week had said his comments were taken out of context, He said accusations that he threatened to rape anyone at Purdue were “false and defamatory” and “a complete fabrication.”
Early Saturday, Newman sent a letter to Schultz. In the letter, shared by Newman with the J&C, Newman said he only learned about the university’s comments through the media and hadn’t been given a chance to explain his side of the story or to share the emailed “character assassination” and threats of violence filling his inbox.
And, he wrote, he has no plans to apologize.
“If anything, you owe me an apology — indeed, you should probably be begging my forgiveness — for facilitating the dissemination of fabricated and defamatory statements about me, and for failing to vehemently denounce the effort made of Students For Life to destroy my life and career,” Newman wrote. “I'm not planning to hold my breath waiting for one.”
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Purdue Students for Life continued to press its case with campus administrators on Friday, a day after campus police said there wasn’t sufficient evidence to take action against Newman.
Meanwhile, another group of students planned a rally from 1 to 3 p.m. Monday outside Hovde Hall, where President Mitch Daniels’ offices are.
“We believe that Mr. Newman clearly crossed a line,” said Garen Bragg, a senior in the Purdue Polytechnic Institute. “Purdue claims that they are ‘committed to providing all community members with a learning and work environment that is free from sexual harassment and assault.’ But apparently that doesn't apply to their own staff members. … I'm just a student who believes that the university needs to do the right thing.”
So here’s the conspiracy scorecard for the president’s office in a week of flare-ups on campus along the pro-life/pro-choice boundaries.
On one side, Daniels was being painted as complicit with the right wing, allowing Purdue Students for Life’s “Hands Up, Don’t Abort” fliers and the targeted claims about black women to be posted on kiosks and chalked onto sidewalks without comment or retribution near the Black Cultural Center.
On the other side, Daniels’ Purdue was getting hammered from the right for taking less than a day to decide that there was little the university could do about an employee accused of aiming a threat of rape at pro-lifers. Here’s an example from online site Conservative Review: “It seems that the modern American academy is completely willing to transform itself into a $50,000-per-year adult day care, complete with safe spaces and segregated housing. That is, until their students stray from their implicitly-mandated leftist credos.”
In reality — and in both cases — the real moral of the story was: Words have consequences, even when lobbed in places where overheated rhetoric is the norm.
And even on a campus where a fresh free speech policy created less than a year ago is still damp and air-drying on the line.
Purdue Students for Life last week wound up apologizing for its tactics, after being challenged by another student group. Student leaders acknowledged they didn’t fully grasp how charged the messages they posted were. The two groups didn’t wind up on the same page about reproductive rights, but they were able to talk things out in a civil manner.
A �Hands Up, Don�t Abort� standard at Purdue
When those same pro-life students went to Purdue police Wednesday night to say they felt threatened by Newman’s social media posts, they had to piece things together to get from comments about rape back to a question about safety on campus. Newman had posted frequent, critical and pointed comments on the Purdue Students for Life’s Facebook page after the “Hands Up, Don’t Abort” fliers went up. To say he was shy about how vile he thought the group’s message was would be a lie.
When someone tracked down comments Newman made at the national, pro-life LiveActionNews.org site that had him suggesting raping pro-life women — comments made as part of a longer online conversation about GOP presidential candidates’ views on abortion — the students and their advisers pounced.
If you haven’t been in an online comments section lately, consider yourself the big winner in all this. The game is predicated on one commenter baiting another, with the other returning the favor.
That apparently happened in this case, though the context Newman claims isn’t immediately available because many of his comments were flagged and removed by LiveActionNews.org. What remained, via a screen shot provided by Students for Life of America, was this one: “Oh, I’m sorry. So, let me make my intentions quite explicit: I did in fact offer to rape Tom’s wife/daughter/great grandmother. Free of charge, even. I’m generous that way.” He then offered the phone numbers for West Lafayette police and the local FBI office, closing with: “Drop that dime! I could strike at any minute.”
As a rhetorical device, facetious or not, offers of rape are rarely a good idea. OK, never a good idea.
But did anyone take it as an actual threat?
Kristina Hernandez, spokeswoman for Students for Life of America, maintains that students in Purdue Students for Life took the comments seriously, even though acknowledging that no one on campus was directly referenced or threatened.
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“He said it from a position of authority and the university has done nothing to discourage him,” Hernandez said.
Schultz, though, said the police investigation led to another conclusion.
“If it appeared that Mr. Newman had any such intention, he would have been terminated immediately,” Schultz said. “But the police investigation tells us that there was, and is, no real threat to the campus community.”
That didn’t end the conversation, Schultz said. “Employment-related actions” are still possible based on the internal complaint process, he said.
Then Schultz unloaded.
“Had he uttered such an outrageous and vulgar statement while working for a private college or other private employer, he would almost certainly have been fired on the spot,” Schultz said. “Mr. Newman’s obnoxious rhetoric is an embarrassment for Purdue, but our special obligations as a public institution impose a much higher threshold before condemnation can be extended to punishment.”
With that, Purdue made its point. Will it be enough to make this past week of turmoil go away? Not likely.
As for Newman, he said he was standing his ground.
"God did not grant people in the anti-abortion movement an exemption from His commandment against bearing false witness,” Newman told the J&C. “If those in that movement insist on continuing to defame me, they should fear His wrath. I don't."
Bangert is a columnist with the Journal & Courier. Contact him at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.
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