Written by Ran Tao
Dozens of students gathered Monday outside of USC's Price School of Public Policy to protest a professor's controversial email about how to handle sexual assault allegations.
James Moore, a professor at Price, sent an email last week to all students of the school defending due process in sexual assault allegations. Moore said in the email, "accusers sometimes lie."
You can read more about the email controversy here.
Some Price school students were offended. They protested today at noon to demand Professor Moore to be fired.
About 40 students held signs and chanted "Times up!" "No Moore" as they marched to the dean's office at Price School.
"I think that Price School is usually very adamant on holding social justice as one of its pillars, and I don't know if this stands in line with that mission," said Ariella Amit, one of the students who attend the protest. "And I hope that more people become aware of this and start speaking out about what they think should be free speech on campus."
Audrey Mechling, a second-year master's of public administration student at USC Price, said she decided to host the protest because she believes it's important for the voices of victims to be heard.
"I think a lot of women and men are reliving their trauma this week, this month and this year, it's been a really hard year for survivors," Mechling said. "And I think the message that survivors need to be hearing is that we believe you. So when I got an email from one of our professors saying that sometimes accusers lie. That was really traumatizing."
Moore later explained that his intention was not to minimize the trauma of sexual violence.
"There are many incremental things we can do to make things fairer to the accused while still taking victim seriously and acting on their complaints in a systematic and responsible way," Moore said
About the protest, Moore said he was interested in what students have to say.
"There is some emotion that I am a little surprised, the students obviously feel and think very intensely about it," he said. "I am not exactly looking forward to it, but I am interested in what they will say".
LaVonna Lewis, a Price professor, said she disagreed with Moore's statement, and attended the protest.
"Students need a space to share the pain, so the protest becomes the opportunity to do that," she said.
At the end of the protest, the Dean of Price School Jack Knott asked for responsible participation.
"We want to have a forum for open discussion debate like this, but we want people to participate in more responsible and respectful ways," he said.
As for the decision about professor Moore, "We are going to have a faculty meeting this week and we are going to talk about mandatory trainings for faculty. We will also look at the list, since we want this list to be useful for all students for communicating."
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Correction: In the previous version, we said "James Moore, a professor at Price, sent an email last week to all students of the school defending due process in sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. " After reviewing emails exchange and interviews, we found that although Professor Moore's email response is under the context of Kavanaugh hearing, his response is to the due process in sexual assault allegations in general. Thus, we deleted "against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh."
We also made changes at the end of our first paragraph from "controversial email about survivors of sexual assault" to "controversial email about how to handle sexual assault allegations."
Further changes were made to the title of the article to better reflect the email sent by Moore.
Changes are made 12:40 a.m. on Oct. 2.
Additional changes made at 11:30 a.m. on Oct. 2.