How dark is too dark, and does it matter who is listening?

A feminist student group recently filed a Title IX lawsuit against the University of Mary Washington that alleges the college failed “to protect them from a sexually hostile school environment.”



But the university denies there is a “sufficiency of evidence” to support the group’s claims.



Members of the group Feminists United at the University of Mary Washington filed the lawsuit against the university and its former president Richard Hurley on May 4. The plaintiffs allege that the university violated Title IX and the 14th Amendment when they did not take sufficient action against offensive speech by male students at the university.



Most of the speech occurred on the social media app Yik Yak, where users could post anonymous messages (known as “yaks”) to others in their geographical area.



The lawsuit classifies many of these messages as “overtly sexist and/or threatening,” and Feminists United claims that by not shutting down Yik Yak on school Wi-Fi, the university fostered a sexually hostile environment, failing to “protect the Plaintiffs from [the] effects” of the offensive yaks.



The lawsuit alleges that Mary Washington exhibited “deliberate indifference” to the “sexually hostile environment” created by the yaks. “Deliberate indifference” is potentially actionable under Title IX.



These claims are disputed by both the university and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit campus civil liberties group.



In a statement to The College Fix, campus spokeswoman Anna Billingsley pointed out that the claims contained in the lawsuit are similar to claims made by Feminist United in a 2015 complaint to the Office for Civil Rights. Billingsley pointed out that there are “no new allegations” in the lawsuit, that the university “has fully cooperated with the [Office of Civil Rights] investigation” into the matter, and that the investigation “has not yet produced any findings as to sufficiency of evidence to support the 2015 allegations.”



And a FIRE representative points out that none of the yaks cited in the suit constitutes a threat under Title IX provisions.



FIRE representative Daniel Burnett, in an email to The Fix, referred to the 2003 Supreme Court case Virginia v. Black, which states that “‘true threats’ encompass those statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”