Note to My Dean of Students "Monitors"

In the letter which Michael Wilner CMC '11 wrote to the academic standards committee (ASC) requesting special treatment for his thesis, Wilner writes:

At its worst, the Dean of Students Office has had to monitor his blog for my safety, since no boundaries have been respected regarding the viciousness of the character assassination he has waged.

Let's correct that sentence so it reads truthfully:

At its most effective, I have asked the Dean of Students' office to monitor his site because I am worried that someone will act violently against me after Charles has exposed me for what I am -- someone who punches women.  

I doubt very much that there are any threats against Wilner. It goes without saying that I certainly condemn threats against someone's physical person and hope that no one harms him, a common courtesy that I note in passing that he did not extend to his victim.

But I would say this to my Dean of Students "monitors": If there are any credible threats against Michael Wilner, I urge you to report them immediately. Given the low threshold for bias incidents in the past like the tortilla incident, any such a threat should be common knowledge by our campus. If there is no threat, I invite you to read my website, not monitor it. That's how we treat the press in America.

Anyways, if there are no threats against him, we must assume that there are none and that he is using his attorney to intimidate the Dean of Students office. It seems to be working. I've heard back from friends that Dean Mary Spellman is "investigating" who has been giving me information. This, in and of itself has a chilling effect on student speech and on whistle blowers. (Such whistle blowers, by the way, need not worry about coming to me with documents or material. I will never betray their confidence because that's what journalists do, thanks to California's very strong press shield laws.)

 If the Dean of Students' office monitored Wilner's behavior, which was evident as of 2008, thanks to the student letter, perhaps there would have been no need for the J-Board in the first place.

This all seems very familiar, but I would have hoped that the college would have learned its lessons after the Kerri Dunn debacle. Simply because someone says they are threatened doesn't mean they actually are. They might be using likely public responses to make a political or personal point. In other words, they could be lying.