Reed College, a small liberal arts school in Portland, Oregon, attracts students who want to speak their mind.

But when Jeremiah True wouldn't stop talking about his controversial opinions on sexual assault in his required freshman humanities course, his professor banned him from the discussion segment of the class for the remainder of the semester.

The 19-year-old told BuzzFeed News that his professor, Pancho Savery, warned him repeatedly that his views made his classmates uncomfortable before he told him in a March 14 email that he was no longer welcome to participate in the "conference" section of his Humanities 110 lecture-seminar class.

"Please know that this was a difficult decision for me to make and one that I have never made before; nevertheless, in light of the serious stress you have caused your classmates, I feel that I have no other choice," Savery wrote in the email, obtained by BuzzFeed News.

True, whose Facebook page says he studies "How to Annoy People" at Reed, takes pride in challenging his classmates' opinions.

"I know many people aren't comfortable with taking the stances I do, but I'm not a sheep," he said.

True said he sparred with classmates over discussion topics related to ancient Greece and Rome, such as the "patriarchal" belief that logic is more important than emotion and his analysis of Lucretia's rape. But it was his questioning of the widely shared and often debated statistic that 1 in 5 women in college are sexually assaulted — it doesn't serve "actual rape victims" to "overinflate" numbers, he said — and his rejection of the term "rape culture" that led to him being banned, he said.

"I am critical of the idea of a rape culture because it does not exist," he wrote in a lengthy email to Savery explaining his perspectives that he has also posted online. "We live in a society that hates rape, but also hasn't optimized the best way to handle rape. Changing the legal definition of rape is a slippery slope. If sexual assault becomes qualified as rape, what happens next? What else can we legally redefine to become rape? Why would we want to inflate the numbers of rape in our society?"

More than 90 colleges are currently under federal investigation for allegedly mishandling sexual violence cases. Sexual assault on campus has become a hot-button issue both in Washington, where the White House launched a task force and senators have introduced bipartisan legislation, and on campuses like Reed, which roughly 1,500 students attend. For activists nationwide, the crackdown on campus sexual assault is long overdue. But other politicians and commentators have accused schools under pressure of suppressing free speech and mistreating accused students.

Reed's own policies have been the object of scrutiny for years. Despite its small size, Reed's students reported the most sex crimes of all colleges and universities in the state of Oregon during 2010–2012 and ranked third in the number of reported assaults per 1,000 students in the country in 2012.

"Reed is a private institution that often drops the ball in its responses to sexual misconduct, but this is an excellent example of a professor taking initiative to take care of his students," senior Rosie Dempsey told BuzzFeed News. "Of course, we are an institution that encourages dissent and active discussion, but there is a difference between stimulating discussion through opposition and making other students feel unsafe."

Savery, who declined to comment to BuzzFeed News, wrote in his email to True that he had discussed whether to ban True from class with another professor before making his decision.

"There are several survivors of sexual assault in our conference, and you have made them extremely uncomfortable with what they see as not only your undermining incidents of rape, but of also placing too much emphasis on men being unfairly charged with rape," Savery wrote to True. "The entire conference without exception, men as well as women, feel that your presence makes them uncomfortable enough that they would rather not be there if you are there, and they have said that things you have said in our conference have made them so upset that they have difficulty concentrating in other classes. I, as conference leader, have to do what is best for the well-being of the entire class, and I am therefore banning you from conference for the remainder of the semester."