“Hot for Teacher” files appeal

Media reports state that former Oakland University student Joseph Corlett plans to file an appeal in his $2.2 million civil rights lawsuit against the university.

 

The move comes less than a month after U. S. District Judge Patrick Duggan granted OU’s motion to dismiss the case.

 

Corlett, 57, had been attending OU as a writing and rhetoric major when he was suspended for three semesters and ordered to undergo sensitivity counseling after writing a two-part journal entry entitled “Hot for Teacher.”

 

In the essay, Corlett discusses his physical attraction to the instructor of his English class.

 

“Kee-Rist, I’ll never learn a thing,” he writes in one entry. “Tall, blond, stacked, skirt, heels, fingernails, smart, articulate, smile. I’m toast but I stay.”

 

Corlett alleged in his suit that the suspension violated his first and 14th amendment rights.

 

In the opinion accompanying his decision, Duggan disagreed.

 

“When the Plaintiff referred to his Oakland University English professor as ‘stacked’ and graphically compared her to a sitcom character he fetishized in a writing assignment, he brought a pig into the parlor,” wrote Duggan.

 

Although the speech may have had its place, Duggan wrote, the classroom was not it.

 

The Oakland Post will continue to follow this story.