Ohio University Journalism Student Arrested For Fabricating Death Threat Against Herself

On Monday, one of the managers of an Ohio University student newspaper was arrested after campus police discovered that she had fabricated three separate threatening messages against herself, at least one of which was a death threat.

Anna Ayers, a journalism student who is also a member of OU’s student senate and was formerly a columnist for The Post, has been charged by university police with three misdemeanor counts of “making false alarms” in relation to the hoax threats. If convicted on the charges, Ayers faces up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine for each of the three counts. She is first set to appear in court on Thursday morning to answer the charges.

According to The Post, which had reported on the fake threats last week, Ayers claimed that she had found two notes in her senate desk —one that directly attacked her for her “LGBTQ identity” and called her “a derogatory term,” and another threatening to kill her. Tellingly, The Post reported at the time that people at the school had already figured out that those notes probably came from someone involved with the student senate because although “[a]nyone [could] enter the senate office…whoever left the note had to know which desk belonged to Ayers” in order to deliver the threat.

After making her manufactured threats public, OU’s student senate postponed all of its events in favor of holding a special hearing on the “threats” against Ayers. At the hearing, Ayers reportedly spoke at length about the trials and tribulations caused by reading her own notes

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Teacher Accused Stephen Miller Of Eating Glue When He Was 8: Now She’s Under Review

A teacher who said President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller ate glue as a child is under review by the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District in California for disclosing information of the former student.

The DCNF reports:

Nikki Fiske, 72, revealed accounts of having Miller, 33, in her class when he was 8-years-old to The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday.

The school placed her on “home assignment,” which means Fiske is not at work but retains employment status, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD) spokeswoman Gail Pinsker told The Daily Caller News Foundation. Pinsker emphasized that Fiske “is not suspended.”

“He [Miller] was a strange dude,” Fiske said to The Hollywood Reporter. “I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn’t have glue sticks in those days — and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it.”

Fiske added that Miller was a “loner.”

The article recounting Miller’s alleged behavior as a third grader has received push back since its release.

“What kind of teacher goes to an entertainment newspaper with gossip about an 8-year-old boy?” Becket Adams wrote in The Washington Examiner Wednesday. “Hell, forget that she’s a teacher. What kind of human being does that?”

William Jacobson, a Cornell University professor and founder of the blog Legal Insurrection, said The Hollywood Reporter’s focus on a teacher “badmouthing” was meant to bring down Miller. “It’s meant to dehumanize Miller, to suggest he is brain damaged,” Jacobson wrote Thursday.

Pinsker said the district was concerned about Fiske’s “release of student information, including allegations that may not have complied with applicable laws and district policies,” The Los Angeles Times reported.

“The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District is looking into this matter and has placed Nikki Fiske on home assignment pending the completion of the review,” Pinsker told TheDCNF over the email.

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Australia: Freedom Charters may be needed to Protect Free Speech on University Campuses

The most concerning aspect of the current debate about free speech in Australian universities has been the complacent attitudes of Australian higher education leaders.

During Bettina Arndt’s recent speech at Sydney University on ‘rape culture’, riot police had to be called onto the campus to allow the event to proceed, after security guards were overwhelmed by demonstrators blocking audience members from attending the venue.

However, according to Sydney Vice-Chancellor, Michael Spence, the demonstration allegedly showed that “free speech is alive and well” in universities; the student demonstrators were supposedly exercising their legitimate right to protest and engage in counter-free speech.

In reality, the violent scenes of verbal and physical abuse witnessed were an example of the ‘no platforming’ phenomena prevalent in North America, which has seen numerous so-called controversial speakers banned and prevented from speaking on university and college campuses because their views are deemed ‘offensive’ or ‘hurtful’ to some students.

But according to Vicki Thomson, the Chief executive of the Group of Eight peak lobby ground representing Australia’s leading universities, there is no need for universities to take action on free speech on campus because she “couldn’t remember a particularly violent protest [on university campuses] in the past 10 years.”

Thomson was responding to the suggestion by Federal Education Minister, Dan Tehan, that Australian universities adopt the charter — the Statement on Principles of Free Expression — introduced by the University of Chicago in 2014 and subsequently adopted by 45 other American universities.

But if university administrators like Spence and Thomson are unwilling to even acknowledge free speech problems, it is difficult to trust them to self-regulate free speech solutions.

These attitudes suggest that stronger government regulation may be needed to actively spur universities to properly protect freedom of thought and expression on Australian campuses.

My new report, "University Freedom Charters: How best to protect free speech on Australian campuses", therefore proposes a new regulatory framework — based on the polices announced in the Canadian province of Ontario — which would hold universities accountable for implementing and complying with free speech policies, or have them risk financial penalties.

Tying funding to actively protecting free speech on campus would focus the minds of university administrators on free speech problems — especially the minds, once funding was directly at stake, of administrators who claim there is no problem and mistake legitimate protest with disruptive conduct interfering with the free speech of others.

As I told The Australian  this week, universities should consider the report a “shot across the bows.”

If university administrators don’t like the idea of government regulation, the power to forestall this is in their hands. They should take Minister Tehan’s advice, and put in place robust free speech policies to ensure universities remain true universities committed to free and open inquiry.

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