College rescinds student’s suspension

Board rethinks decision over recorded professor

When suspending Caleb O’Neil for recording his professor’s speech against then-Presidentelect Donald Trump, the dean of Orange Coast College said that the punishment should make the student “truly think through your actions and the consequences of those actions.”

But it was the college that rethought its actions — after two weeks of intense criticism that the California school was stifling a conservative student to protect a liberal professor.

The school canceled the suspension during a special board meeting last week, according to the Orange County Register, and issued a statement saying, “The board believes this is in the interest of fairness and equity for all.”

“All” would include O’Neil, 19, a Trump supporter, and psychology professor Olga Perez Stable Cox, who called Trump a white supremacist in a classroom speech that O’Neil helped make viral.

Shortly after Election Day, Cox told her human sexuality class that Trump’s victory was “an act of terrorism.”

“We’re really back to being in a civil war,” Cox said as O’Neil and others listened.

“I pulled my phone out, because I was honestly scared that I would have repercussions with my grades because she knew I was a Trump supporter,” O’Neil said earlier this month.

He recorded the speech and showed it to a campus Republican group, which complained to administrators that Cox was abusing the power of her grade book.

Frustrated that the administration did not act on their concerns quickly enough, the Republicans posted clips of the lecture online.

O’Neil’s video prompted headlines across the country and drew a ferocious backlash to the Costa Mesa, Calif., campus.

After weeks of threatening emails and voice mails about the video — calling her a “Marxist,” “nut case” and “vile leftist filth” — she fled her home and turned her class over to a substitute after getting an email that listed her home address, phone number and salary.