[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Editor’s note: A culture of rampant lawlessness has been steadily growing in American academia. Our nation’s universities have shamelessly put their pursuit of woke leftist ideology ahead of their loyalty and obedience to the laws of the United States of America and the principles of freedom and equality of opportunity that inform them. The Freedom Center is exposing the worst perpetrators of this illegal conduct as the Top Ten Academic Felons, and we will be highlighting one school a day as we count down from #10 to #1. San Jose State University is #8 on our list.
#8: San Jose State University
While a number of prominent colleges and universities have violated Title IX by allowing biological men to play on women’s collegiate sports teams, perhaps nowhere was the favoritism and bias more evident than at San Jose State University where trans-identified male athlete Blaire Fleming was given a coveted spot on the women’s volleyball team roster.
Fleming’s mere participation is a violation of the law, but the trans athlete was also treated with extraordinary favoritism and allowed to flout team rules. He also allegedly plotted to injure a teammate critical of his place on the women’s team—a potential crime that received only a cursory investigation by a firm already invested in Fleming’s success.
Instead of defending its female players, San Jose State chose to stand by Fleming and attempted to silence female athletes and an assistant coach who disagreed with the decision to allow a male on their team.
Fleming’s participation in female sports did not receive much attention until his senior year when an article from Reduxx, an online magazine that is critical of transgender ideology, helped to expose his role on SJSU’s women’s volleyball team. The news that one of their “female” players was actually male was already well known to the coaches and administrators at SJSU, as well as to many of the student athletes on the volleyball squad.
One of Fleming’s teammates was Brooke Slusser who was initially Fleming’s friend and roommate after transferring to San Jose for her junior season in 2023. Slusser has stated publicly that she initially had no idea that Fleming was actually a male.
“They didn’t tell anyone. The school, the staff, they didn’t talk about it whatsoever,” Slusser said.
“At no point during Slusser’s recruitment or the 2023 volleyball season did her coach, Todd Kress, or SJSU inform Slusser that Fleming was male, even when her coach and the athletic department frequently assigned her to room with Fleming on road trips,” describes the California Insider.
“Slusser would not have roomed with Fleming or changed clothes in front of Fleming if Slusser had known Fleming was male,” a lawsuit filed by Slusser states.
Slusser eventually discovered the truth about Fleming’s sex but was cautioned by team coach Todd Kress and other SJSU officials not to comment on his participation on the women’s team. As the controversy ramped up, other universities in the Mountain West conference began to willingly forfeit games against San Jose State rather than participate in an unfair contest and face a male athlete on the court. Unable to keep quiet any longer, Slusser joined a number of other female athletes in a lawsuit against SJSU and the Mountain West conference for violating Title IX.
The volleyball team’s assistant coach, Melissa Batie-Smoose, soon filed her own Title IX complaint to defend the women’s team and was immediately suspended indefinitely for daring to speak out on their behalf.
“My assistant coach spoke truth to protect my team. Then… they (suspend) her. They took away the only safe space we had in the program. Because she knew that it was right to stand up for the 18 women on the team. Not one man,” Slusser commented on X.
The complaints from Slusser and Batie-Smoose made the public aware of even more disturbing allegations regarding Fleming: that the trans athlete had potentially conspired with a competitor to attempt to injure Slusser on the court.
According to the lawsuit filed by Slusser, the night before a team match against Colorado State, Fleming along with several of his teammates snuck out of their hotel room (which is a violation of team rules) in order to visit Colorado State volleyball opponent Malaya Jones. One of those teammates who was present at the meeting later told the SJSU coaches that trans player Fleming had plotted with Jones to deliberately spike Slusser in the face during the teams’ October 3 face-off.
“[The teammate Chandler] Manuskey said that at Jones’ residence Fleming had shared with Jones the scouting for the CSU-FC game and they had discussed Fleming ‘throw[ing] the game’ and how they would set up Jones to ‘blow up’ Slusser and ‘blast’ her in the face during the game,” the court documents state.
“Manuskey also said that Fleming stated, ‘I’m going to leave center court open,’ which would allow Malaya Jones to have a wide-open shot to try to ‘blow up Slusser,’ i.e., to try to hit Brooke Slusser in the face with the ball.”
Slusser’s teammate Chandler Manuskey described Fleming’s plot to injure Slusser to her coaches before the next day’s match, but according to legal documents, head coach Todd Kress refused to believe her. Kress was forced to investigate the allegations, but instead of hiring a neutral party, he selected the same law firm that was helping to protect Fleming’s eligibility to play in women’s volleyball.
Fox News describes how “attorney Tim Heaphy of the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher led a third-party investigation into allegations against San Jose State’s transgender volleyball player Blaire Fleming of conspiring with an opponent to harm a teammate. Heaphy carried this out in the same month that other partners in his firm worked to protect Fleming’s eligibility to compete in women’s college volleyball. Heaphy later offered the school legal counsel to help it navigate a federal Title IX investigation over the same situation.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fleming was cleared of any wrongdoing by this supposedly impartial investigation in just three days.
If Fleming and Jones had followed through on this plot, it could have caused severe injury to Slusser who was still feeling effects from a concussion the previous year.
“It’s obvious once this was put out into the public that there’s so much bias in this situation, and they’re trying to just sweep these things under the rug and not have to deal with it when there’s obvious problems going on all over the place,” Slusser said in an interview on Fox News.
“They need to be held accountable for using the same law firm and not doing a thorough investigation because Title IX was built to protect women, and they’re obviously deciding to protect the man in this situation when they were blatantly trying to harm a female athlete at their school, and they’re still backing this male athlete and that’s just wrong all over the place. And there’s schools all over the nation doing this, they’re just not getting the spotlight it deserves.”
San Jose State University’s deliberate violation of Title IX by allowing a man to play women’s volleyball and its subsequent censoring and persecution of the female players and assistant coach who dared to speak out, earn the university its place on the list of Academic Felons.
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