Appeals Court Says Professor’s “Suck my D*ck” Comment is Sexual Harassment

Slippery Rock, PA- It’s a well-known fact that alcohol makes people lose their inhibitions and sometime their sense, but could the things you say when you’re drunk constitute sexual harassment? The can if you are a college professor a Pennsylvania court recently decided.

A faculty union at Slippery Rock University challenged their employer’s decision to fire a tenured professor who suggested one of his students “suck his d*ck” during a night of excessive drinking at a bar in Madrid, Spain.

The case before the appeals court involved Professor Robert Ammon Jr., who was chaperoning a student trip to Spain in spring of 2010. After returning from the trip one of the female students, who was present that night, confronted Ammon about his comments and raised concerns with the University.

According to the student Ammon went around and asked the students how many sexual partners, then proceeded to boast that he has been with 100 partners and five of those sexcapades occurred after he was married, HigherEd. Com reported.

After that boast, Ammon was asked which student was his favorite to which he replied that if a particular female student, who was in attendance, “sucked his d*ck,” she would be his favorite.

When confronted with the incident by the student Ammon went to University “admitted making improper comments and unprofessional statements, but referred to the comments as “trash talk” and should not be characterized as sexual harassment, court documents stated.

The University then decided to fire Ammon for “unprofessional conduct” for drinking with students and for “making inappropriate sexual comments to and about students,” Inside Higher Ed reports.

Ammon along with a faculty union challenged the firing, but in a 2-1 vote the Pennsylvania appeals court decide Slippery Rock University was justified in firing Ammon.

The Judges wrote in their decision that Ammon’s position as professor and department head, “places him in a position of repeated exposure to female students, and he continued his inappropriate behavior after he was disciplined in 2006 for similar conduct, which indicates a substantial risk that female students will be subjected to similar action in the future.”

The Pennsylvania appeals court decision comes shortly after the Department of Education outlined new sexual harassment rules for universities and colleges. Those new rules created a firestorm with free speech advocates who feared that simply asking another person out on a date or flirting with them could be interpreted as sexual harassment.

The DOE rules that created the controversy were more specifically aimed at the forcing Universities and Colleges to take allegations of sexual harassment more seriously and set up a reporting system that would adequately address complaints of sexual harassment and assault.

After creating such a controversy the DOE stated that federal standards of sexual harassment which required that the inappropriate behavior be repeated, pervasive and made the environment of the campus hostile for the victim still stood and that flirting or requesting a date did not meet those standards, but apparently a professor suggesting student perform oral sex does.

Ammon’s comments cost him his career so let this serve as a cautionary tale to teachers and professors; be careful what you say to your students even when you aren’t on campus.