At a number of schools around the country, all sorts of special accommodations have been made to enable Muslims to pray on campus.

Foot baths.

Prayer rooms designed with Islamic sensibilities in mind.

But on at least one campus, Christian prayer will get you tossed out on your ear, according to a lawsuit filed in California.

Two students filed a federal lawsuit this past Monday against the publicly-funded College of Alameda alleging that school officials at the California school threatened to expel them for praying.

The events prompting the lawsuit took place in December, 2007, a press release from the Pacific Justice Institute reports.

That month, student Kandy Kyriacou visited an instructor to give her a Christmas gift. Kyriacou found the instructor alone in her shared office. When the instructor indicated she was ill, Kyriacou offered to pray for her.

The instructor bowed her head and Kyriacou began to pray. They were then interrupted by another faculty member, Derek Piazza, who entered the room and said “You can’t be doing that here!”

Kyriacou left to join her friend and fellow student Ojoma Omaga. Piazza followed Kyriacou and repeated his rebuke. The students related that they were surprised by his intimidating behavior.

Three days before Christmas, both students received letters notifying them of the college’s retroactive “intent to suspend” them. While school policy requires such letters to state factual bases for the charges, the letter only vaguely accused the students of “disruptive or insulting behavior, willful disobedience . . . persistent abuse of college employees.”

An administrative hearing reportedly found KyriacouÂ’s prayer worthy of discipline and threatened suspension or expulsion for further infractions.

Excuse me – “You can’t be doing that here”?

Why not, exactly? Since when is a public college or university a religion-free zone? Since when is voluntary prayer forbidden – especially since, it would appear, that the prayer was taking place in the instructor’s office, which would be a private (or at least semi-private) space. Even were the office shared with Piazza, that would not in any way limit the right of Kyriacou and her instructor to engage in prayer in that space, any more than it being a shared space would allow Piazza to dictate what topics of conversation the two could discuss in the space.

What’s more, Piazza’s decision to pursue the two students and engage in an ongoing religiously based harassment of the two should have resulted in disciplinary action against Piazza, not the students. Such behavior was clearly an abuse of whatever minimal authority that Piazza would have outside of a classroom or his office space. While the record here is unclear as to what interaction the two students had with Piazza during that time, I would imagine that it related to the two attempting to defend their First Amendment rights – something which should not result in disciplinary action at a public institution.

I’m curious – would the same penalty have been imposed if these had been some of the school’s “diverse” Muslims? Or would Piazza been shipped off to a sensitivity class for giving the students offense by his words and action – assuming he was not the subject of a fatwa or beheading.

Posted by: Greg at 10:53 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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