This one is incredibly infuriating. This stuff is straight dystopian:
-Immediately following the panel, she filed a "professionalism concern card"—a kind of record of a student's violations of university policy.
-According to Bhattacharya's lawsuit, the concern card generated interest from an assistant dean in the medical school, who emailed him and offered to meet. The assistant dean assured him that "I simply want to help you understand and be able to cope with unintended consequences of conversations."
-Meanwhile, the Academic Standards and Achievement Committee met to to discuss the concern card
-Bhattacharya responded that contrary to anyone's assertions, he had not lost his temper or become frustrated with the panel:
Your observed discomfort of me from wherever you sat was not at all how I felt.
-On November 26, this suggestion became a mandate: The student was informed that he must be evaluated by psychological services before returning to classes.
-He was ultimately suspended for "aggressive and inappropriate interactions in multiple situations." On December 30, UVA police ordered him to leave campus.
For me, the interesting thing about this story is that I can imagine the social dynamics at play and how a bunch of people sign off on a decision that they know is wrong but they go along anyway because it's just easier. Obviously I don't know any of the people involved in this story, but there is a type of "social justice" personality who flips out over any deviation from orthodoxy. That's how this starts -- a student asks a pointed question to the wrong person, who reports them for what is essentially wrongthink.
At this point, ordinarily the dean or a department chair or somebody would sit down with Dr. Social Justice and talk him off the ledge. But this actually requires some skill, because you can't just tell Dr. Social Justice that he's being unreasonable and he needs to get over it. Dr. Assistant Dean is going to have to work with Dr. Social Justice for years and possibly decades, and Dr. Social Justice is a bully. If Dr. Assistant Dean says the wrong thing or inadvertently suggests that the student's viewpoint is worthy of consideration, then Dr. Assistant Dean becomes the bad guy in this narrative, and Dr. Social Justice, who has probably grown bored with such pedestrian concerns as teaching, research, and service, will make it his goal in life to undermine Dr. Assistant Dean. That's not at all an unrealistic scenario when you consider that Dr. Social Justice has a posse and none of them have ever been told that they're anything but 100% on the side of Virtue and Truth, and administrators are evil anyway.
So the Assistant Dean asks himself, who do I want to piss off? A student who I'll never see again, or a colleague who I'll need to work with in the future? I can tell you with 100% certainty that there is a type of university administrator who is sufficiently cynical to view that decision as a no-brainer. [I've been told as much by folks. One of my favorite academic administration anecdotes involves a panel of university general counsels -- in-house attorneys -- that I sat in on a few years ago at a conference. They were very open about the fact that they sometimes advise their presidents and provosts that it's better to lose or settle a lawsuit than to end up in the local newspaper as the bad guy. Now of course those people are lawyers so of course they're soulless Machiavellians, but I run into this kind of mindset all the time among people who want to advance their careers. Also, the general counsels had a very good dark sense of humor about this and they're probably fun to be around at the local tavern, which is not the case for your average office drone. It was a genuinely fun panel.]
In this case, that calculation backfired. But it only backfires like 1% of the time. For every student that ends up like the student in this story -- with a lawsuit and an audio recording the more or less backs up his side of the story -- there are 99 other students who go away quietly.
Of course, it's not just the Assistant Dean. A bunch of people had to sign off on the decision to ban this student from campus, and I do worry that some vital piece of information is being left out of this story. I had a situation years ago with a psychotic graduate student who was an expert at threatening people without saying anything that would look especially bad if you were simply reading a transcript (think Cape Fear). So I don't want to sit here and say that obviously everybody at UVA is craven and awful. If a follow-up story revealed that there was something seriously wrong with the student, I would not be shocked or even surprised. But yeah I can see how UVA officials may have gotten cornered by a bully and are now regretting it.