Cal Poly student’s complaint against professor is without merit

Cal Poly student Mick Bruckner discovered something at Cal Poly that he didn’t like last year: a professor who disagreed with him.

Bruckner filed a Title IX discrimination complaint against lecturer Michael Winn and claims Cal Poly failed to take his initial complaint with the gravity that it deserves.

Based upon the Tribune’s reporting of the substance of Bruckner’s complaint, Cal Poly probably took it far more seriously than it deserved.

A quick synopsis of Bruckner’s grievances:

▪  Winn voiced skepticism that homosexuals were targets of the Holocaust.

▪  Winn believes that the legalization and sanctioning of gay “marriage” is a grave moral mistake.

▪  Winn has never heard “a gay man give a ‘good’ Christian viewpoint on homosexuality.”

▪  Bruckner says that Winn believes homosexuals are immoral.

Cal Poly’s spokesman noted that the details in Bruckner’s complaint have “yet to be proven either true or false, as the investigation into this matter is ongoing.”

I’ll go ahead and assume that every one of them is true.

I hope that Bruckner is planning on a career in academia, government or journalism, because in the real world, this is rather weak sauce.

Outside the “safe spaces” of modern university campuses, people — typically referred to as adults — encounter other people who disagree with them on various issues, from religion to politics to sports.

Many of these “other people” are “wrong” about all manner of topics. In fact, The Tribune will be providing a handy list of them online at the bottom of this column under the header “Comments.”

Scientists have come up with a highly technical term for this kind of situation: life.

Nothing Bruckner has alleged is discriminatory. Nothing.

Discrimination is a student being thrown out of a master’s program in counseling for his or her beliefs, as Andrew Cash was at Missouri State University. Cash was removed from the program because he said he could not counsel a gay couple because of his religious views and would instead refer the couple to someone more appropriate to help them.

Discrimination is a student being thrown out of class for disagreeing with a teacher’s views, then having the teacher come running after the fleeing student while calling him a racist and a bigot, promising to get the student suspended for bullying and harassment. That’s what happened to Daniel Glowacki after he told his instructor that “the homosexual lifestyle was against my Catholic religion.”

Discrimination is being berated, thrown out of class and being called names, as was the case at a Georgia high school. There, a teacher was filmed calling a student the N-word, and immediately after the student left the room, the teacher called him an anti-gay slur.

Those are all discriminatory and deserving of, at the very least, a reprimand by the proper authorities in each case and in some cases, much, much more.

However, Bruckner doesn’t allege that anything approaching the gravity of any of these cases occurred.

Bruckner doesn’t claim that Winn ever raised his voice to him. Bruckner doesn’t claim that Winn used any slurs. In fact, Bruckner doesn’t claim (at least to The Tribune) that Winn gave him a lower grade than he deserved in the class. Bruckner doesn’t claim that Winn censored him by refusing to allow him to give a speech about homosexuality.

Winn has taught at Cal Poly for more than 20 years. He has certainly had gay students before. And, according to Bruckner, Winn said he’d never had a problem.

Well, last year, Winn encountered Bruckner, and now he can’t say that anymore.

Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out a Cal Poly administrator lied to Bruckner about Winn supposedly retiring in an effort to avoid telling Bruckner that his complaints were without merit, hoping he would go away. You can hardly swing a dead cat around here without hitting administrators behaving badly.

But none of this is discrimination. It’s nothing more than being subjected to an adverse opinion.

Hundreds of millions of Americans experience this at least once in their life. The vast majority of them get over it … eventually.

Bruckner would do well to follow their example.

This story was originally published June 11, 2016 at 8:57 PM with the headline "Cal Poly student’s complaint against professor is without merit."