With headlines ranging from The Daily Beast‘s “Rape Culture Troll Threatens Reed College” to Daily Caller‘s “Student Barred from Class for Disputing Rape Statistics”, Jeremiah True ’18 and his story have trended locally and nationally. Now, he is excluded from campus with a pending Honor Case against him.
His controversial petition to be restored to his Humanities 110 conference after a removal by his professor caught fire when Buzzfeed picked up the story on March 19. His professor, Professor of English & Humanities Pancho Savery, excluded True from the conference after a series of disruptive behaviors, which The Quest enumerated in an earlier investigation of this issue.
Generally, media attention was divided into three camps: those pro-True who supported his argument about free speech and first amendment right, those anti-True who noticed nuances in the line between individual freedoms and disruption of a classroom environment, and those who thought the situation was murky and that True’s approach has been unproductive.
In an interview with Charles C. Johnson, True said, “I’m basically trying to generate two sides in the media. Either it’s a free speech issue or I was continuously disruptive of class. And the second side simply isn’t true. I’m just drawing more and more media attention because I’m giving all of this evidence that I seem to be a jerk-wad, but I’m not. I’m hoping I can get more and more coverage until I use this to launch my media career.”
While True has welcomed media attention, Professor Savery has declined many interview requests. Instead, Professor Savery has received backlash, both via email and in the media, from his decision to exclude True from the conference. Professor Savery tells The Quest he has received approximately 160 emails from both Reed community members and from strangers all over the country. While many of them have been supportive, some — from primarily men with no affiliation to the Reed community — are “quite nasty.”
“Someone emailed and said that he is not going to allow his child to come to Reed because of me… One email put quotes around professor and said that I was an embarrassment to the profession. I have also been called a fascist, and I have no idea who these people [who have emailed me] are,” Professor Savery says.
Spring Break, but not for Spring Crisis
Following the week’s earlier demonstrations by True, on Friday, March 20, True disrupted a forum on student activism, inserting himself into the space, declaring the attendees to all be “niggers” and then proceeding to ask each of them “Does anyone know why Pancho Savery has lied about me online?”
By Monday, March 23, True claimed he had 22 no-contact orders against him, which he states is a record high at Reed. Director of Community Safety Gary Granger could neither confirm nor deny this claim.
Over Spring Break, the Woodbridge residence hall, where True lived, held a community forum to talk about recent disruption on campus related to True’s actions both in the classroom and in the residence hall.
While the media flurry seemed to die down by the end of Reed’s Spring Break, True’s continuation of non-violent protests was not over yet.
Week after Spring Break
On Monday, March 30 at 9 a.m., True sat on the floor at the front of Vollum Lecture Hall during Hum 110 lecture under the chalkboard which read: “Restore Jeremiah True to their Conference” and “Your hypocrisy is showing Dr. Savery.” True remained on the floor wearing earbuds and removed his shoes while Professor of English & Humanities Laura Liebman proceeded to lecture on Virgil’s Aeneid. At the end of the lecture, True yelled out “Cowards!” to the general audience.
Just before 10 a.m. that same day, True stood outside of Professor Savery’s Humanities 110 conference on the third floor of the Performing Arts Building. When Professor Savery and the Humanities students began class, True approached the glass windows of the class, looking at the class and staring into the room. According to Professor Savery, the students were “upset and disrupted” by his presence, and the class proceeded to lower the blinds.
True persisted, walking back and forth along the length of the glass wall, occasionally peering through the cracks in the blinds and into the classroom. Professor Savery says, “I think people [in the conference] made the decision to ignore him, so as to not let him take class away from them because they thought that had happened too many times. We tried to have a normal class and ignore his presence.”
Lauren (not her real name) — who is in Professor Savery’s conference — found Jeremiah’s presence disruptive.
“His presence outside of the classroom was really aggressive,” she says. “I got up and shut the blinds so that he couldn’t just stare at us, but it was really scary. He still tried to peer in and glare at individuals in the class through the blinds, and it made all of us uncomfortable. One girl had to move where from where she was sitting so that she wouldn’t have to see him because it was so disruptive and distracting.”
Professor Savery continues, “I assumed when the Hum conference was over, it would be over.” He was wrong. Even after the Humanities 110 class ended, True remained outside of PAB 331 during Professor Savery’s next class, an upper-division English course titled “The War in Vietnam: 40 Years After.”
Professor Savery acknowledged True’s presence to his English conference, saying to his students, “We have the blinds down because, in case you haven’t noticed, we are being stalked.” The upper-division English students felt similarly unsettled by True’s unwarranted presence as an onlooker into the classroom.
During a lull in the middle of the conference, Zak Garriss ’15 asked for Professor Savery and the class’s permission to call Community Safety to ask True to refrain from disrupting the classroom. Garriss, like the majority of the students in the classroom, found True’s behavior to be “provocative and distracting.”
“[True] was stalking back and forth by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, aping and mimicking Pancho’s gestures, glaring at Pancho, flapping his arms, and making strange theatrical movements. It was one of the worst conferences we had, and everyone was extremely quiet,” Garriss says, “If he was protesting, I don’t know who his audience was.”
Having received Garriss’s call, Gary Granger and Associate Dean of Students Bruce Smith came to the PAB and asked True to leave the area outside of the classroom. True left for approximately five minutes, but he returned to the PAB and continued his behavior for the remainder of the class. During class, Garriss emailed Granger and Smith, alerting them of True’s return. Granger and Smith arrived as students were milling out of class, and Smith spoke with True while Granger spoke with Professor Savery about the morning’s events.
Reaction to Monday’s events
Despite the fact that True has remained non-violent, Lauren says she still is not comfortable being near him.
“I am afraid of him, and he hasn’t really like — besides running around on the front lawn, slamming his fists on the classroom table, and lurking near our classroom — physically intimidated me, but I am afraid to be around him,” she says.
Many different College staff members and departments were involved in interacting with True. Student Services staff can maintain visibility on students in crisis through an online system called SASSI, or Shared Access to Student Services Information, which allows staff of the College to share notes and reports on particular students. To maintain standards of confidentiality, staff members could not confirm specifics about what they had done about True’s case specifically, but did indicate that in such a situation where a particular community member is a concern they do use this system.
By Tuesday, March 31 at 5 p.m., True was excluded from campus, and a Community Rights Subcommittee Honor Case was filed against him. A CRS case is a type of adjudication process which allows a community member to hold someone accountable for actions that affected the community, and not necessarily oneself personally.
In a written personal statement available to the public, True compiled an account of recent events from his perspective. True wrote, “I wish to return to class. I wish for Reed and Pancho to acknowledge that I belong in my class. I was not disruptive, nor was I threatening. I have brought attention upon myself in order to make a particular point. Language can not ever be violent. Violence is violent, and I was not violent nor did I threaten to enact violence.”
Professor Savery says, “I think that this [situation with True] is a real tragedy. I am upset about the things that he did, and I am upset about the distress that he caused to students in my classes. I am extremely upset about things that he put out on social media in which he said really nasty things about people from the Reed community and specific students in conference. I am upset about all of those things, but more important to me than all of that is the tragedy that [True] was someone who was talented and articulate, who had real talent with potential to do good and interesting things. Now, it seems like he is going in the wrong direction and wasting his talent.”
Professor Savery says he had looked forward to working with True during the student’s Reed career, but says now, “Rather than feeling any sense of triumph, I feel really sad.”
True was contacted for comment, but he declined. Instead, True replied with a link to the Jeremiah Josias Luther George True Public Figure Facebook page, with a tagged post from the night of April 2 asking for help to create “a large enough storm” to pressure Reed’s judicial process. The post links to an uncharacteristically short summary provided by True:
“On March 14, 2015, Reed college banned me from the conference portion of a mandatory general education course led by Professor Pancho Savery. Students in the class were uncomfortable with me citing facts to counter proven false claims that one in five women are raped on campus. I have also disputed accusations of rape commonly levied unfairly against men. This event was widely covered in the media, and since then my situation has deteriorated. In return for peacefully and civilly protesting my unfair treatment, Reed has deemed my lawful dissent so disruptive that they have banned me from campus, rendering me homeless. I sit now in a hotel (which I will soon no longer have as a home) awaiting recompense for the wrongs that have been done to me by the misguided policies of the college.”
Neither this short summary nor the longer narrative in “The Full Story” show that True acknowledges that his behavior may have created a hostile learning environment during his time in conference and in lecture.
Vice President & Dean of Student Services Mike Brody, Dean of the Faculty Nigel Nicholson, and Bruce Smith all declined to comment on recent events with True.
Brody did confirm that, generally, “Making a decision [to exclude a student] often entails a very complex process of evaluating multiple factors as they evolve over time, and weighing the interests of an individual and those of the community as a whole. I am also acutely aware that when a student lives on campus, excluding them means evicting them.”
Currently, there is a Community Rights Subcommittee Honor Case filed against True. In emergency situations, the Dean of Student Services may exclude a student for an alleged violation, but a complaint must come to the Judicial Board or the Sexual Misconduct Board within six working days, according to Section 3.B. of the Student Judicial Board Code. In such cases, the exclusion shall remain in force until the conclusion of the judicial process.