Banned professor sues SUNY Fredonia leaders

A philosophy professor at SUNY Fredonia who has been was banned from the campus for 17 months, after questioning the moral argument against adult-child sex, is suing the president and vice president of the school.

The plaintiff, Stephen Kershnar, is a distinguished teaching professor who was presented with the Chancellor’s Award of Excellence in Teaching.

The defendants are SUNY Fredonia President Stephen H. Kolison Jr., and Vice President and Provost David Starrett.

Kershnar, who is represented by Barry N. Covert, of Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria LLP, in Buffalo, and Adam B. Steinbaugh and Joshua T. Bleisch, of the Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression, in Philadelphia, filed the complaint in June in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York.

The lawsuit claiming Kershnar’s First Amendment rights have been violated is seeking a declaration that controversial statements made by Kershnar’s are protected by the First Amendment and that the school violated his First Amendment rights by banning him from teaching.

He’s seeking preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent the school from banning him, along with nominal, compensatory, and punitive damages, and attorneys’ fees.

Kershnar has been banned from campus since February 2022 because of controversial statements he made questioning the moral basis for a prohibition on adult-child sex.

On Dec. 5, 2020, Kershnar appeared on the Unregistered podcast, which is hosted by Occidental College professor Thaddeus Russell.

“During the Unregistered podcast, Kershnar provided an analysis of the traditional philosophical justifications of age of consent laws in the United States,” according to the complaint.

“During the Unregistered podcast, Kershnar stated that he became interested in researching and writing about the morality of adult-child sex and ‘whether or not an act is wrong because it’s harmful,’ after he read some studies that suggested that some sexual conduct involving minors is not always harmful,” according to the 46-page complaint.

“Kershnar commented that ‘it’s not obvious to me why’ all instances of adult-child sex are unlawful because, among other things, humans are designed by evolution to begin reproduction below the age of 18,” according to the suit.

On Jan. 30, 2022, Kershnar appeared on the Brain in a Vat podcast. During the podcast, Kershnar stated: “Imagine that an adult male wants to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Imagine that she’s a willing participant. A very standard, very widely held view is that there’s something deeply wrong about this, and it’s wrong independent of being criminalized. It’s not obvious to me that it is in fact wrong.”

On Feb. 1, 2022, a Twitter account shared a 28-second video clip from the Brain in a Vat appearance, captioned: “SUNY Fredonia Professor questions the widely held (societal) belief that it’s deeply wrong for an adult man to want to have sex … with a 12-year-old girl.”

Within six minutes, the clip was also shared by Libs of Tik Tok, a Twitter account user with 500,000 followers. That account tagged Kolison’s Twitter account, tweeting: “Hi @DrKolison, it appears you have a problem at your university.”

The first clip shared by Libs of Tik Tok received 1.5 million views. That account shared eight more clips of Kershnar’s appearances on Brain in a Vat and Unregistered, and condemned Kershnar’s comments as “truly horrifying.”

About three hours later, the school posted a message from Kolison saying “the matter is being reviewed” and calling Kershnar’s views “reprehensible,” according to the complaint.

On Feb. 3, 2022, school officials ordered Kershnar to stay off the campus because of “concerns about security.” The same day, campus police and university staff searched Kershnar’s office and his desktop computer was seized for “analysis,” according to the suit.

Fredonia’s director of human resources, Maria Carroll, sent Kershnar a letter stating that he was to “perform an alternate work assignment from an alternate location,” according to the suit.

“When President Kolison separated Kershnar from the campus community, he had no basis to believe that Kershnar was a danger to any member of the campus community,” the suit claims.

“Kershnar remains barred from the classroom, banished from campus, and prohibited from communicating with the “campus community” at Kolison’s direction,” according to the complaint.

Instead of teaching, Kershnar was instructed to review of the philosophy curricula at each of SUNY’s campuses and other public universities, purportedly in order to consider what courses should be offered at SUNY Fredonia, according to the complaint.

Kershnar also was instructed to complete training required for instructors to teach online so that he could develop course materials for other instructors to teach two philosophy courses online.

The school’s claims that Kershnar’s exile from campus is necessary because of safety concerns “are purely pretextual,” the suit claims.

“Although SUNY Fredonia claims it received threats, its police incident reports are barren of reports of threats, it has not reported them to local law enforcement, and the FBI says it is unaware of any specific threats to Kershnar. While SUNY Fredonia claims it was motivated by concern for Kershnar’s safety, it refuses to tell him anything specific about any purported threats,” according to the suit.

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