German law enforcement will arrest people at home for purported insults, but at least they are told what specific language warrants their prosecution.

Two American students didn't get that courtesy when their State University of New York constituent campus accused them of discrimination and harassment, with one later learning he was under investigation for referring to an administrator as an "idiot" and another falsely told he had been cleared of unspecified behavior, according to a civil liberties group representing them.

Long Island's Nassau Community College, which has a history of treating criticism as prohibited conduct, refused to engage with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression despite the "conditional privacy waivers" provided by students Jordon Groom and Grant Peterson, whose punishment included "sensitivity training" and suspension from campus leadership.

Counsel Russell Penzer told FIRE on Feb. 20 "all due process safeguards have been and continue to be followed" from NCC's anti-discrimination and complaint procedures, and anyone who "feels their rights have been violated … have their remedies," without elaborating.

"A Soviet tribunal would probably give these students a fairer shake then Nassau administrators," Graham Piro, FIRE's faculty legal defense fund fellow, said in a press release. Penzer and top school official Maria Conzatti didn't respond to Just the News queries Tuesday and Thursday.

"Colleges sometimes invoke privacy to avoid substantively engaging with FIRE's concerns" despite privacy waivers, Piro told Just the News. "We definitely see that practice more than we'd like to, so Nassau is not alone in ignoring the waiver."

The situation, which FIRE made public Tuesday, resembles Ohio Northern University's sanctions against a law professor critical of diversity, equity and inclusion practices, which prompted denunciations from academics on the left and right and representation by America First Legal, founded by two-time Trump White House aide Stephen Miller.

Two months after a county judge approved professor Scott Gerber's lawsuit for trial on breach of contract, retaliation, defamation and "false light" last fall, the private ONU sued him in federal court for "perverted" litigation in service of "ulterior purposes include exercising personal vendettas" against officials and "political retribution" on them. Gerber hasn't responded yet.

FIRE is also advocating on behalf of law professor Kenneth Lawson, who sued the University of Hawaii for First Amendment retaliation stemming from his criticism of Dean Camille Nelson for dismissing his concern that its 2023 Black History Month event lacked "black facilitators."

Lawson and Nelson are both black, with Nelson telling the dean she didn't understand the civil rights movement and him responding that "her experience as a black woman gave her perspective to understand racism," according to FIRE.

Nelson countersued Lawson on Jan. 31 for defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress, a move Lawson deemed a strategic lawsuit against public participation – banned by law in Hawaii – in his Feb. 20 motion to dismiss.

NCC student Peterson isn't the first community member to face sanctions after criticizing its leadership in recent years, in another dispute in which FIRE intervened.

The taxpayer-funded college nearly lost its accreditation in 2016 amid a "toxic battle over the college’s leadership, political influence and financial planning," Newsday reported when it was removed from probation a year later, but the battles continued.

The board of trustees told the community three years ago that "correspondence disparaging" President Jermaine Williams, for remaining in the job after becoming president of another college, "must stop," apparently referring to a critical letter from the faculty union and allegations of "questionable spending" of COVID-19 relief funds.

Williams filed bullying charges against union President Faren Siminoff, which an email from board member Kathy Weiss "suggests … were submitted with a retaliatory purpose," FIRE told Weiss in a March 22, 2022 letter after the board ignored its Jan. 11, 2022 letter.

NCC punished Groom and Peterson "without providing them copies of the complaints filed against them, a meaningful opportunity to respond to the allegations in the complaint, or a meaningful opportunity to appeal," FIRE's Piro wrote in a Feb. 7 letter directed to acting President Maria Conzatti.

The Office of Affirmative Action didn't tell Peterson, the chair of the Student Academic Senate, why he was being summoned to meetings or who would be there, and even when it formally notified him of two complaints, "they each merely named him as a respondent of discrimination and harassment allegations." 

Peterson first reviewed "more than 40 allegations against him" in a Dec. 2 meeting with Associate Vice President Craig Wright, who refused to let him make a copy and gave him so little time to review that he could not "fully respond to the allegations in writing," the letter says, citing an audiotape Peterson made. (New York is a one-party consent state.)

The student's notes say he's accused of telling a complainant, "You have no idea what you’re talking about, once again," and referring to an NCC vice president "who was not present at the conversation an 'idiot.'" The complaints also cited the "authoring of impeachment documents" by Peterson and Groom, a student member of the board of trustees.

Groom didn't know he was under investigation until the board told him to leave the room at its Dec. 10 meeting so it could "discuss an investigation that involved him," as documented by a tape he made. 

Wright told him Dec. 19, in another meeting Groom recorded, that a complaint against him was deemed to have "no merit" and his investigation was closed but refused to give him specifics.

The bureaucrat dropped the hammer on the stunned students a month later, saying Wright had determined by a preponderance of the evidence that both had discriminated against their complainants. That evidence standard cannot be solely used against students under still-binding Title IX regulations, but it's not clear either was accused of sex discrimination.

Wright suspended Peterson from all of his leadership roles for the rest of the school year and ordered him to complete "Diversity and Sensitivity Training” and ordered Groom to take sensitivity training for creating a "hostile environment of discrimination" through still-unspecified actions, with no ability to appeal, according to the bureaucrat's letters to each.

"NCC’s procedural abuses have now muddied the waters so severely that they have adversely affected everyone even peripherally involved in the case except NCC administrators," Piro told Conzatti. 

It not only deprived the students of any due process but "now wrongfully deprives the student body of a representative in the [Student Government Association] and on the Board of Trustees" by suspending Peterson as Student Academic Senate chair, whose roles include addressing the NCC Academic Senate and meeting with its accreditor's reviewers, Piro said.

Though not mentioned in the letter, Piro told Just the News that NCC was flouting Supreme Court due process precedent granting students facing severe discipline "notice and a hearing, at minimum," even if the hearing is not "formal." Given the serious allegations, "the investigation should have been carried out with more attentiveness to their basic due process rights," he said.

FIRE is leading a grassroots pressure campaign against NCC through a form letter that demands Conzatti follow the school's obligations as a public institution to provide "timely and adequate written notice of charges," the right to present evidence in a hearing and appeals.

NCC has shown "repeated neglect of the rights of its students and faculty over the last several years," and for Peterson and Groom specifically, it must "rescind their punishments immediately, and either give them a fair hearing or drop the charges," the letter says.