Ten Points about The Title IX Vendetta by The UC & The Cincinnati Enquirer

Brian Calfano

A professor. A whisper campaign. A law meant to protect weaponized against him. What began as a dispute over a class turned into something much darker. Read the story the headlines didn’t tell.

10 Point Summary (Full entry below):

ORIGINAL POST

I was warned. I just didn’t want to believe it.

When my friend, a local attorney whose parents had worked for the University of Cincinnati, told me that the university uses sexual harassment allegations as a cudgel against faculty they want to get rid of, I thought it was hyperbole.

Then, several weeks later, the list of charges from the University’s Title IX Office landed in my inbox. I was stunned. These charges were nothing short of extraordinary, both because of what they alleged and because the university thought it appropriate to commence with an investigation in the first place.

The allegations concern how I taught an applied television news course in the spring of 2024. But, as another attorney friend once told me, what college administrations use to go after professors is never the real issue at hand.

In my case, it was a perfect storm of two people seeking to undermine me.

A Perfect Storm

The first was an associate dean in the University of Cincinnati College of Arts & Sciences who was used to bullying college faculty with impunity. In one instance, I opposed this person’s actions and tone of voice with me in front of another administrator over a DEI hiring process. In my role as head of the Department of Journalism, I had hired an extraordinarily well-qualified woman for a part-time faculty position who I was then told I’d need to “un-hire” because of the imposition of a new (and previously unadvertised) DEI process. Needless to say, bullies lash out when they’re called out.

The second was a former subordinate in the Department of Journalism who was disgruntled because of the performance review I gave him and the fact that I presided over a reduction of this person’s rather generous stipend. The subordinate was also enraged that I was willing to pay the well-qualified woman I hired for the part-time role more than the subordinate made doing the same job years prior. According to the woman, the subordinate spewed several sexist insults at her. After a report of this incident made its way to the college HR office, headed by the administrator with whom I had the run-in, I was shocked to learn that HR would take no action against the subordinate. The university’s Title IX Office also refused to take action on the case. Instead, the subordinate and administrator worked in tandem to undermine me.

In their first effort to punish me, the associate dean, based on behind-the-scenes discussions with my subordinate, stripped me of my role as head. In the process, they used the Provost’s office to charge me with a variety of falsities concerning my work performance, conflicts of interest, and mismanagement of scholarship funds (the latter of which were fully controlled by the college, not me).

These charges, most of which were based on rumor and hearsay, were beyond bogus. Yet they’re exactly what you would expect from university administrators with a vendetta.

The Title IX Investigation

Comments from a minority of students in the television performance class then lit the Title IX fire. The students didn’t like the standards I expected them to work up to, nor did they wish to take on the responsibilities of what it means to produce a professional news program for air.

This was, in fact, the first television performance-related course ever taught in the Department of Journalism. And no course ever had a regular newscast on local cable—both were firsts. The students’ grievances opened the door for the administrator and this subordinate (with whom I was co-teaching the class) to manipulate the situation to their advantage by encouraging the Title IX Office to get involved.

If you’re unfamiliar with Title IX, it’s the part of federal law that defines sexual harassment in higher education. The law defines sexual harassment as:

The allegations made against me were: adjusting a lapel microphone on a student during class (after asking permission); moving a piece of hair off a student’s shoulder before filming (after asking permission); texting students about their class assignments; texting students to meet outside of class to discuss their career plans and possible ways they could help future students in the program; pointing a camera down toward a student’s covered legs to record an audio-only track (which is a demonstrably false allegation as video from the camera in question shows); commenting on how well students looked in their professional pictures taken for class; requiring students to look professional in their on-camera appearance; discussing assumptions people can make about appearances in photographs; asking about student hobbies and free time as a way to generate story ideas for their assignments; working with students in my office on edits to their recorded stories; and inviting students to attend a premiere of a documentary I produced to be shown at a major television station event in New York City.

A plain reading of the statute and the allegations should make clear to any impartial and reasonable person that none of these constitutes sexual harassment. There was no sexual content conveyed in any of the actions outlined in the allegations. And critically, not one single student filed a complaint against me; yet the university commenced with a Title IX investigation anyway—in the absence of actual complainants and without suspending me from campus or otherwise sanctioning me in the short term while it conducted its investigation.

Note that the university then allowed me into the classroom in the fall of 2024 to teach the same course (comprised entirely of women) from which the witness allegations arose—with no instruction about changing any of the course components or means of content delivery. In the absence of student complainants, the University of Cincinnati’s Title IX coordinator signed the complaint herself. This is no small action. According to the university’s policy “The Title IX Coordinator may sign a formal complaint when concerns exist for conduct threatening the safety of the University community.” So, my actions apparently threatened the “the safety of the university community,” but I was not barred from campus, told to stay away from any specific students, or otherwise informed of any interim sanctions against me. And, again, no one even blinked when I was assigned to teach–and taught–the exact same course to an entirely female class in fall 2024.

How justified was this investigation if the university was not even bothered enough by the allegations to instruct me how it wanted this course taught while conducting its Title IX inquiry? If there’s any sign that Title IX was used in a vendetta against me by the University of Cincinnati, it is this lack of action from university administrators during the investigative period.

At the same time, as the Title IX investigative report the university wrote shows, all of my actions set forth in the allegations occurred in support of class activities, assignments, and student development. The expert witness documented in the Title IX report deemed my actions credible and in keeping with normal routines in television news.

My behavior was fully aligned with my rights as an academic seeking to provide students with the most meaningful and professionally relevant class possible. The Title IX investigation was an attempt to curtail both my academic freedom and First Amendment rights. It was also meant to do me personal and professional harm. In fact, one of the student witnesses in my case even went so far as to admit that “everyone knew that they (i.e., the university) were trying to get rid of him.”

A Nationwide Problem

Inappropriate actions by The University of Cincinnati’s Title IX Office are nothing new, however, as the multiple investigations of the office by the US Department of Education show. (see: https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/i-team/data-uc-pays-out-more-settlements-than-five-other-universities-combined).

But the University of Cincinnati is not alone. As this report from The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) suggests, Title IX is ripe for abuse against faculty nationwide (https://www.aaup.org/report/history-uses-and-abuses-title-ix).

Media stories about Title IX abuse also document how unaccountable Title IX offices are to oversight (https://reason.com/2020/03/18/title-ix-arizona-state-university-viren-tecedor/).

Yet this is just the beginning of my story.

The Personal Cost

The psychological impact of this experience has devastated me. I came apart at the seams, my mind just unable to understand why or how this happened. My doctor became so worried that I ended up in an inpatient psychological facility. I couldn’t concentrate on my work tasks. I even lost my voice.

Most detrimentally, I hid what was going on from most people, including those who could have helped me had they known. I was just too embarrassed, thinking that I had somehow done something to deserve the weaponization of these allegations against me.

Part of the problem was that I received bad legal advice. I took an FMLA leave for much of the rest of 2024 to deal with the psychological impact of my situation, making it challenging to schedule the Title IX hearing (whereby the university determines whether one is responsible for committing sexual harassment). The default presumption in these cases is innocence on the part of the accused.

I must admit some hesitancy to have the hearing at all. In the preliminary meeting before the hearing, the lawyer retained by the university to run the hearing made comments to the effect that she’d “never seen such a long investigative report,” that this was a “complex case,” and that the findings report would be long.

Given the allegations I faced, and how they had nothing to do with sexual harassment (indeed, the retained attorney even commented on the lack of sexual content in the case), it sounded to both my attorney and me that the “fix was in.” In other words, no matter how bogus the allegations, the vendetta, not reason and fairness, would prevail in finding me guilty (as reflected in the student witness’s comment above). Importantly, Title IX attorneys I consulted with after the case was dismissed called this case a “1” on a 1-10 scale, with “10” being the worst, but I only had this perspective in hindsight. In addition, the only appeal option for respondents found “responsible” for committing sexual harassment is on procedural grounds. In other words, there is no room for an appeal based on the substance of a case. All it would have taken, then, was two of the three hearing committee members, including this outside attorney who considered mine to be a “complex case,” to vote against me on just one of the charges, and I’d be found guilty. With the way everything else in this process was slanted against me, I was extremely wary of a hearing. But, I expected to have one because the university has the right to conduct a hearing even if a person is no longer employed there. And this leads me to the next part of the story.

The Dream Job

A few months prior to the preliminary meeting with the university attorney, I came across my dream job. A major TV station ownership group offered me a position as an anchor and political reporter for one of its stations. I had dreamed of this kind of full-time work since I was a kid, and now the opportunity was right in front of me.

I had spent 20 years in higher ed and thought I could always return to it at some point, but this chance to live out my dreams was too good to pass up. So, I signed the TV contract and planned to start my new life and career in December 2024.

That just left the Title IX matter. By this time, my attorney thought it best to avoid a hearing, if possible. It was patently obvious to anyone who viewed the allegations that the university should just close the matter (which it could have done at any time without holding a hearing). But it wouldn’t.

I was still on FMLA leave, which meant that there would not be a hearing scheduled while the leave was active. I assumed that the university would schedule the hearing once the leave expired. The challenge was that my leaving for the new TV job overlapped with the FMLA leave. Once I was no longer an employee, the university decided to drop the matter and close the case with no finding made.

I wanted the hearing, and was expecting to participate in it while at my new job. Yes, I was leery about it because I came to have little faith in the attorney I had at the time. That lawyer was not a specialist in Title IX matters; indeed, I didn’t know about this area of law until early 2025. In January 2025, the university said it was dropping the entire matter because I left its employment. It had the latitude to do that. But it also has the latitude to hold a hearing regardless of my employment status. I formally asked the University of Cincinnati in February 2025 to conduct a hearing as a means to clear my name. The university flatly refused my request.

The Vendetta Continues

Unfortunately, while I might have been gone from the university, the vendetta followed me. A month after I started the TV news job, a former student of my subordinate, who was tipped off as to the Title IX matter, used his reporter position at The Cincinnati Enquirer to run a story about my departure from the university.

Despite the reporter’s obvious and unacknowledged conflict-of-interest, and the lack of a finding of any kind by the university, the Gannett paper used the term “sexual harassment” in its headline along with a selective placement of quotes from the public record to paint me in an unflattering light. The headline made it look like I left my job because of the investigation rather than as the result of having won a dream job.

To the best of my knowledge, the reporter never contacted me for a comment. He also failed to call my boss in the university’s journalism department. My boss would have happily provided context. There’s no indication in the story that the reporter called anyone who had any knowledge of the investigation for a comment, not one student from my class, none of the investigators or committee members, no one at the university, and certainly not me – the subject and target of the story.

This reporter – Quinlan Bentley – could have easily found people who would have spoken to him. Bentley knows the school well. He had just graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in journalism. He likely still knew students at the school. He certainly knew all the professors and instructors and administrators who knew me and would have spoken with him on the record.

Instead of seeking context about the unproven and dismissed allegations, he pieced together a story from the redacted investigative record provided under open records. Everything used in the story came from investigative notes. It made me look terrible, which was clearly the intention. Bentley had been tipped off by someone who wanted to do me harm, and that harm was done with his story.

I challenge anyone on the editorial team at The Cincinnati Enquirer to explain how the report meets even the most basic tenets of objective, fact-based journalism. Friends have described it to me as a hit job. And boy did that hit work. For example, the article notes that I created a chat group comprised of women in the class, without mentioning that the class was 75 percent female and that the students in question all self-selected into a similar type of on camera and reporting assignments (making my outreach to the group logical). Neither did the story note that I never actually sent a text of any kind to this all-female chat group: I only formed it while exploring ways to get students (notorious for not responding to emails in a timely manner) to pay heed to assignment deadlines. And since the texts I sent to both women and men in the course related to class assignments, the article’s point about sending texts in the first place is nonsensical in relation to a sexual harassment charge. This is likely why the story never discusses the content of the texts themselves: it only mentions that I sent them. The story also fails to mention that none of the students filed a formal complaint against me.

Someone (I wonder who?) emailed the article to my bosses at the TV station the morning it was published. Because I was in my contract’s probationary period, and wanting to avoid any negative publicity, the station fired me. I had just moved 750 miles for a job that I lost because of a vendetta based on falsehoods and the weaponization of Title IX.

And the damage continues: As a result of this newspaper article, I’ve lost out on other job and professional opportunities. In fact, another former student of my subordinate (and a colleague of Bentley’s) Zurie Pope has taken to harassing me on social media by posting the Enquirer article in the comments section of my posts. Like the Associate Dean and former subordinate, Pope is settling a score. When I was journalism head, I had to remove Pope from the student newspaper after auditors discovered that Pope was continuing to work a paid reporter position (with the tacit approval of my subordinate) even though Pope was no longer enrolled in the university (a clear violation of university policy). It’s sad to see that Bentley and Pope lack journalistic ethics to the extent that they’re willing to seek revenge against me, either for themselves or in support someone else’s vendetta.

My reputation is now in tatters, and those who continue to work with me have started feeling the repercussions of doing so. And now, because of this article, my name has been added to a national database of faculty committing sexual misconduct (as if any of the accusations have anything to do with sexual content or behavior and as if I was found guilty). All it took to make this turn of events happen were students willing to make accusations (no matter how unrelated to Title IX definitions), administrators diabolical enough to put the processes in motion, and a student reporter looking to score points with a former faculty member. The entire situation has become a personal and professional nightmare based on vendettas and abuse of power.

Final Thoughts

Let me say this – I believe Title IX is important to protect students and faculty because sexual harassment exists. But I did not engage in it.

Like I said, I was warned. I just never thought that this level of personal and professional destruction was possible. The weaponization of Title IX by academic administrators and unscrupulous members of the media is real. No faculty member is safe.

Brian Calfano