Christian DeJohn v. Temple University
Cases
Temple University
Case Overview
- Other Amici: American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, Christian Legal Society, collegefreedom.org, Feminists for Free Expression, Individual Rights Foundation, Students for Academic Freedom, Student Press Law Center
The precedential decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in the case of DeJohn v. Temple focuses mainly on the unconstitutionality of Temple's abandoned speech code—which had been disguised, as so many schools are doing nowadays, as part of its sexual harassment policy.
The case probably would not even have been filed if Temple had not treated DeJohn so badly in the first place. Following DeJohn's complaint, here's what happened:
Christian DeJohn, a student in Temple University's Master of Arts in Military and American History program, was also a member of the Pennsylvania National Guard. DeJohn was deployed to Bosnia. While deployed, he received a number of anti-war e-mails from a history professor at Temple. DeJohn expressed his displeasure with the e-mails, and Department of History e-mails then stopped coming. When it was time for him to return to school, he found that he had been dismissed from the university. As DeJohn tells it, Temple "failed to grant DeJohn military leave guaranteed by federal and state law" and "dismissed him from school (later claiming his dismissal was a ‘computer error')."
It is often intimidating to speak out against the views of one's professors. But in an environment where speech has been chilled by an unconstitutional speech code — the Third Circuit has essentially said that Temple cannot be trusted to respect freedom of speech, even now, hence the injunction.