This article originally appears in the July 2017 issue of ELLE.

Teresa Buchanan had something of a reputation among the young women—and her students were always women—enrolled in Louisiana State University's pre-K through third grade education program. She used the f-word in class, overshared about her personal life, and could be brutally candid in her critiques of the student teachers under her tutelage.

One of those professors you could never forget, the pretty, diminutive 54-year-old with the long, straight brown hair inspired many of the future grammar-school teachers. But others couldn't stand her—and in December 2013, senior Rachel Ginn decided Buchanan had gone too far. What most disturbed her, Ginn said when she lodged a complaint with the university at the end of the fall semester, was a comment Buchanan had made during Ginn's assessment team meeting, a sort of oral exam for student teachers. Ginn was describing her service project—a coat drive that had brought in 300 coats for needy kids—and mentioned that her fiancé had helped her out with it. "Well," Buchanan told her, according to LSU documents, "he might support you now when the sex is good, but trust me, he won't support you in five years when it's not as good." Ginn was "mortified" that a professor would make assumptions about her sex life—and she was too afraid of Buchanan, she said, to confront her about the matter. Ginn confessed she was so upset that she was considering changing majors, or transferring out of LSU altogether.

After that day, the university never allowed Buchanan to set foot in another classroom, and, following a five-month investigation and a year and a half of professional limbo, she was fired. "Our students have the right to learn in an environment free of sexual harassment, bullying, and verbal abuse," said a statement released by LSU's public relations department. University president F. King Alexander told the New Orleans Times-Picayune he'd had no choice, lest LSU run afoul of Title IX, the 1972 law passed by Congress to prevent sexual discrimination at colleges that receive federal funds: "A university that tolerates, inadequately addresses or is deliberately indifferent toward sexual harassment may be subject to loss of federal funds and/or may be liable for money damages…."

Alexander was referring to the fact that under then-president Barack Obama, the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights had ramped up its investigations of universities for inadequately addressing sexual violence, as well as sexual harassment, the latter of which it defined simply as "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature," be it "verbal, nonverbal, or physical." By that yardstick, LSU argued, Buchanan was a sexual harasser. Yet considering that Title IX had been conceived to provide equal educational opportunities to women, it's difficult to imagine its early proponents wouldn't be aghast to see the law used to drum a strong woman out of a job. In court pleadings, Buchanan's attorneys refer to her plight as "a case of political correctness run amok," another example of college administrators' readiness to indulge students' ballooning list of sensitivities—as extreme a reaction as the Mount Holyoke and American University theater groups canceling performances of The Vagina Monologues out of respect for women without vaginas.

"I'm a pariah," Buchanan says when we meet on the patio of a beignet stand in New Orleans's City Park, a few blocks from the one-bedroom apartment she's renting from a former student. Picking at a sugar-dusted doughnut, wearing a white peasant blouse and denim skirt, Buchanan is birdlike, nervous, and prone to tears. Where, I wonder, is the intimidating professor of Ginn's assessment, or even the woman who stood before cameras at a press conference in January 2016 defiantly announcing her lawsuit against LSU? "I can't seem to find a job," she tells me. "I think 150 job applications at last count. I even applied at Barnes & Noble. They turned me down. I am old! Over 50, for any employer, is old." For the last year, she's had a consulting gig evaluating New Orleans public school teachers. "It's not a lot of money, but I'm grateful for the work," she says, allowing, resignedly, "a high school graduate could do it."

There is no doubt that the loss of Buchanan's $78,000-a-year salary has taken a toll on her, but what's less clear is exactly why she was ousted—and if it was at all justified. The questions are especially important now that the Trump administration has begun to dismantle key initiatives of the Obama years. Is the Title IX sexual harassment definition too broad, a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech, as Buchanan's suit charges? Or is it not the definition that's the problem, but overzealous enforcement by cynical or just benighted LSU administrators? Is Terry Buchanan really guilty of anything other than being a tough professor with a salty tongue?

During the Great Depression, Louisiana governor Huey Long twisted arms to wangle federal Works Progress Administration money to build a world-class academic institution on 650 steamy acres on the east bank of the Mississippi. The campus, with its Palladian buildings graced by red-tiled roofs and stands of luxuriant live oaks whose massive boughs rest on the ground, almost seems designed to conceal that LSU is a public school in a state that has always been one of the poorest in the country. Even for the South, the university has never been on the forefront of social change; when the Tiger football team accepted a black player in 1971, it was one of the last Southeastern Conference teams to do so. The student body today is 74 percent white and 12 percent black (a third of the state's population is African American), and as recently as 2006, Confederate flags recast in the school colors of purple and gold were waved in Tiger stadium—a practice LSU staunchly defended on First Amendment grounds despite black student protests. Women's progress has been similarly slow. The College of Education had been churning out overwhelmingly female classes since 1908, but it wasn't until 1965 that a woman joined the department. And it was only in 1998 that the college welcomed its first female dean, three years after Buchanan was hired.

Buchanan had no reason to believe that she could ever lose her job. She'd gotten tenure in 2001, a protection that is famously tolerant—some argue too tolerant—of a wide variety of classroom eccentricities and beliefs. "You get tenured and you can't be fired," Buchanan says. "I thought I'd spend my whole career at LSU." She felt especially secure because less than a month before she was benched from teaching, Damon Andrew, the brand-new dean of the College of Human Sciences and Education, had recommended that she be bumped up from associate to full professor, a coveted promotion in academic circles. Her department chair and a committee of her LSU peers had endorsed the move without hesitation, as had an outside panel of reviewers from other universities who'd inspected her publication history and accomplishments, which included two LSU awards for exemplary teaching. Such a deep dive presumably would have unearthed any skeletons in Buchanan's academic closet—and since hers was the first such promotion request to reach Andrew's desk, surely he would have approached the task with extra vigilance. In the seven months since he'd arrived, Andrew had also been heard publicly referring to the two-year, pre-K to third grade certification curriculum—which Buchanan had designed 12 years earlier and tends to call "my program"—as the "jewel" of the department.

So Buchanan was completely shocked when, not even a month past her career benediction, she received an e-mail from Andrew with the subject line "Unacceptable Performance." He informed her that she'd be removed from the classroom for the spring semester due to "multiple serious concerns…center[ing] around inappropriate statements you made to students, teachers, and education administrators." The e-mail also said that she would be investigated for violating LSU's sexual harassment policy. "I had no clue what he was talking about," Buchanan says. "I thought there must be some mistake." Whom could she possibly have sexually harassed? Since no details were included, she assumed that it had to be one of her few male students, from an undergraduate honors class she also taught. And though she'd been offered no opportunity to respond to any charges—or even told specifically what they were—the dean had apparently already decided she was guilty of something; in his message, he invited her to withdraw her application for full professor. That the e-mail arrived five days before Christmas from a dean who cultivated an image as an enlightened empath—often ending conversations with his professors by saying "I love you"—felt especially heartless.

Buchanan packing up herLSU office inJune 2015. Courtesy of The Advocate

What Buchanan didn't know then was that in the 11 days since Ginn had complained, Andrew had assigned Associate Dean Jennifer Curry to see if there was any other dirt on the professor. Without alerting Buchanan, Curry interviewed LSU faculty who worked with her, then sought out other students and elementary school administrators willing to talk about issues they'd had with Buchanan over her 18-year career. Curry pulled three years' worth of Buchanan's student evaluations, as well as evaluations from the program's mentor teachers in local schools, scanning them for trouble. By the time Andrew e-mailed Buchanan, her case had been judged serious enough to turn over to LSU's human resources department, which would soon embark on a five-month probe of its own. Significantly, the head of the HR inquiry, Gaston Reinoso, is the deputy Title IX coordinator for employees at LSU and, as such, is responsible for ensuring that professors and staff remain in compliance with the law so as not to risk losing federal funding. No more sensitive arbiter of Title IX violations exists on any campus than its Title IX coordinator.

The investigators didn't have to look far to find witnesses eager to testify that Buchanan was at the very least a handful—a "loose cannon," a fellow professor called her—blunt, unorthodox in some of her teaching methods, and impolitic with so-called "stakeholders" in the local school systems. The handful of media outlets that have reported on the LSU imbroglio and subsequent lawsuit have suggested that Buchanan was fired solely for profanity. But ELLE obtained the transcript of Buchanan's 12-hour March 2015 hearing in front of a five-person faculty panel, and the thick document reveals something far more complicated—a Rashomonic tale in which the same events look dramatically different depending on who's relating them. Swearing was indeed part of the university's case. Buchanan had allegedly used the word pussy three times during a meeting with student teachers and Baton Rouge–area elementary instructors. Nobody—including Buchanan herself—would dispute that the f-word made the occasional appearance in her lectures, but, she argues, it's routinely used in movies deemed appropriate for 13-year-olds, and in practically any hit song played in any sorority house in America. "These are grown women who listen to Drake just like I do," Buchanan harrumphs. "Come on!"

But other allegations fell into different bins—mostly professionalism and abuse of power. In Ginn's meeting with the associate dean, which was recounted during the hearing, she mentioned that another young woman in her class, Kaitlyn B., also felt traumatized. And soon, Kaitlyn reported to the university that during her own assessment team meeting, Buchanan upbraided her until she burst into tears and then began filming her with her cellphone, saying, "You need to see how unprofessional you look." Another young woman, referred to in LSU documents as Student C, reported that in a 2012 class, Buchanan declared that only a "dyke" would wear brown pants, and that the female students shouldn't expect to pass if they got pregnant, even offering to purchase them condoms to prevent it. The student, who was expecting her third child, met with Buchanan to discuss whether she should quit the program; the professor told her that it wasn't really designed for "mommies and wives" and further discussed her learning disability in class, calling the special accommodations granted her because of it "bullshit."

"Men will do anything for you when the sex is good…"

While meeting with her students' mentor teachers in nearby Iberville Parish, Buchanan apparently upset them when she criticized their teaching methods, as well as the job performance of Ed Cancienne, the parish superintendent, whom she'd referred to as "that crazy superintendent." Once Cancienne got wind of her comments—around the same time Ginn complained—he promised that he'd personally make sure Buchanan was arrested if she ever again set foot in one of his schools. The principal of an elementary school also banned Buchanan from the premises because, she wrote in a letter solicited by the investigators, the professor "berated" her student teachers and, in some cases, the work of the mentor teachers. "Very often, not only the students but my teachers would leave these meetings in tears," the principal wrote. There were accusations that Buchanan divulged to her class that she was sleeping with a married man, mentioned the kind of lingerie and sexual positions she preferred, and went on about her son's sex life (all of which she disputes).

Curry discovered a mixed bag in Buchanan's anonymous student evaluations. Some years, the feedback was about evenly divided between praise, such as "Dr. Buchanan truly cared about the well-being of her students," and objections to her brusque demeanor. "She literally called my child portfolio crap to my face," one wrote. However, her evaluations from one semester—the spring of 2012—were almost universally blistering. Students complained that Buchanan canceled classes and one day brought in her yoga teacher as a guest speaker. "I learned nothing, besides I should not wear brown pants, her kid smokes weed, and she is getting a divorce," one student wrote. Other evaluations mentioned that Buchanan announced that she didn't care if people completed their assignments because she probably wouldn't have time to look at them.

The negative appraisals from that period weren't a revelation to Buchanan's colleagues. Early in the spring 2012 semester, about 20 months before she was relieved of her teaching duties, a letter of complaint was delivered to Buchanan's direct boss, Earl Cheek, the longtime chair of the education department. Citing "inappropriate and offensive comments" Buchanan had made in the first weeks of the semester, the letter was signed by "The Junior PK-3 Cohort"—ostensibly, an entire class was in full revolt. Cheek invited the students in to air their grievances, and more than a dozen crowded into his office. Subsequently, Cheek says he met with Buchanan and told her that she had to apologize to the class and change her ways. "She was profusely apologetic," Cheek tells me. "Yes, sir, I will do that," he remembers her promising. It wasn't the first come-to-Jesus meeting between the two, Cheek says: "Terry had a tendency to get emotional. When she did, whatever popped into her head might just come out. After it happened, she'd be remorseful and she'd get better. But then she'd have another flare-up."

Over the years, Cheek's remonstrations were always informal. A 40-year LSU veteran and self-described "Southern gentleman" whose management style one education professor described to me as "laissez-faire," he'd never alerted HR that anything was amiss with Buchanan. "I really thought speaking to her would be enough," Cheek says. Every year without exception, he gave her a satisfactory performance review. So on paper, Buchanan's employment record was spotless.

Some professors thought that Cheek wasn't doing nearly enough to rein her in. One of them, Cyndi DiCarlo, testified in the hearing that while sitting in on one of Buchanan's classes in 2012, she was shocked to hear her colleague observe that all men cared about was sex, and then turn to a married student and add, "Isn't that right, Amanda?" The student "kind of froze and made big eyes," DiCarlo recalled. She also said that the lecture was peppered with f-words and that Buchanan made reference to her sex life, as well as her son's.

Afterward DiCarlo called Buchanan to express her consternation. "What was that?" she asked. Buchanan responded that she needed to use that kind of language to keep the students awake. Loosen up, she told DiCarlo. The divorce rate in America wouldn't be so high if people weren't so petrified of talking about sex. Unmollified, DiCarlo went to Cheek with her concerns. He attributed the two professors' disagreement to "philosophical differences" and told DiCarlo that his hands were tied owing to "academic freedom"—Buchanan was a tenured professor who could teach what and how she wished. Cheek tells me that he was in fact worried about Buchanan's health, but LSU being a state institution, he foresaw only miles of red tape. "I wanted to get her some counseling, but if you read the regulations at LSU, that's a very formal process," he says, that must be approved at the highest bureaucratic level. "You can't just require someone to do that."

So DiCarlo shared her Buchanan story with the half-dozen other PK-3 faculty. Though some of them were friendly with Buchanan, they decided to stage an intervention on a day they knew she'd be teaching. At the appointed time, DiCarlo invited Buchanan into the hall and volunteered to take over her class. Some of her other colleagues were gathered nearby waiting to speak with her, DiCarlo informed her. "Fuck no!" Buchanan yelled twice, to the likely bewilderment of her class. And that seems to have marked the end of her fellow professors' efforts to help her. According to Cheek, the problems appeared to work themselves out: "She said she was going to do better and she did. I did not have another student complain until everything happened two years later."

Buchanan knew that a fair number of her PK-3 students hated her guts. "I was the bad cop," she says. "High-performing students" generally didn't mind her approach, she contends, though Rachel Ginn was an academic standout and thus an exception to her rule. (Indeed, Buchanan says she regrets that she never got a chance to apologize for the distress she caused Ginn.) But as for most others, Buchanan continues, "instead of hearing 'Your lesson plan isn't complete,' they'd think, 'Buchanan's a bitch.' But somebody has to be the quality control officer."

"Quality control officer" is a term Buchanan uses frequently to describe her role, and many of the tales that bubbled up from her students evoke the kind of dressing-down a military grunt might expect in basic training. Her father, Patrick Hughes, was a career QCO in the army and continued that job in the civilian world after he retired, becoming the standards guy for nuclear power plants in Louisiana and Mississippi. "He was the one who went around telling people they needed to tighten up," she says. "You don't want to mess around with nuclear power plants." She and her siblings lived the peripatetic existence of army brats—moving from Oklahoma to Georgia to Texas, and from Germany to Panama. (After raising her children, Buchanan's mom became a much-awarded Mary Kay lady, rolling around town in a pink Cadillac.) Buchanan's classroom riffs may make her sound like a counterculture- immersed hippie, the product of a permissive upbringing, but nothing could be further from the truth. "We were church people," she says. During high school, her family attended the Assembly of God church, a strict Pentecostal denomination known for speaking in tongues. She neither dated nor danced as a teen. "Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal idea and was therefore considered very dangerous," she recites. She tasted alcohol for the first time at 35 and has never smoked marijuana, though her son recently told her, "God made pot for people like you." She's an every-Sunday churchgoer and a lifelong registered Republican who, until Trump came along, dutifully voted for GOP presidential candidates every four years. (As a feminist, she says she opposed Trump, but she's worked through her enmity toward him. "It's easy to get angry, but I did these meditations, and now I can think of him as a five-year-old boy," she says.)

Along with her father's obsessiveness about the right way to do things, Buchanan also inherited his mouth. "He'll say anything," she tells me, and explains that for this reason, she'd prefer I not interview him and be exposed to one of his colorful rants against LSU. "The way he raised me is that some of us have an obligation to speak the unspeakable."

Buchanan had always gravitated toward little kids—she loved babysitting and taught Sunday school as a teenager. She got a degree in business management from LSU, hoping to open a day-care center. She worked in day care as an undergrad, and even back then, she had standards that weren't being met. "I knew enough to know that the program wasn't delivering high-quality care," she says. She became captivated by the idea of designing something better, scrapped the day-care plan, and went on to get her master's at LSU and then a PhD from Purdue in child and family studies. During grad school, she met Greg Buchanan, the man she'd marry, on a spring-break trip.

While she pursued her degrees, Greg made a living as a route salesman for Frito-Lay. When LSU hired her in 1995, Buchanan became the primary breadwinner; Greg looked after their two sons and made some extra money by mowing lawns. In 2012, the couple divorced, and though Terry's attorneys forbid her from going into detail, she does allow that she suffered significant depression and anxiety partly as a result of the split and lost close to 60 pounds. In this context, the appearance of unstable behavior that concerned her colleagues during 2012, and the simultaneous nosedive of her student evaluations, make more sense. LSU's handbook lists several options for paid medical leave, so had Cheek or the school's then dean insisted on her taking time off, the university probably wouldn't have used incidents from that period to make its case against her. It certainly would have been unseemly to single out this year to exemplify Buchanan's performance over her nearly two decades at LSU, but it also might have been illegal: Depression can be considered a disability under the Americans With Disabilities Act. (Ironically, in addition to sexual harassment, LSU charged Buchanan with violating the ADA by speaking about Student C's disability in class.)

None of this is to suggest that Buchanan wasn't a hard-ass before and after her divorce. In 2002, when she was tasked with designing the PK-3 program, she envisioned a Top Gun–like boot camp to build star teachers. Over the years, she says she got similar messages from former students: "They'd send me a friend request on Facebook and say, 'Man, I hated you during our senior year, but thank you so much. You were exactly right. Thank you for making me a fantastic teacher.' " Tyrannical but dedicated professors who are only appreciated in hindsight are such a potent archetype that they've become a film and TV trope, from The Paper Chase's Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. to Legally Blonde's Professor Stromwell. Even children learn that mean teachers aren't always so bad, as in the case of Harry Potter's often sadistic—but ultimately heroic—potions teacher Severus Snape.

But more than that, being tough—cruel, even—is perfectly legal in the workplace as long as you're not singling out people based on their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, or any other protected status. The law doesn't prevent you from being an asshole, as long as you're an equal- opportunity asshole. And if Buchanan's rights were violated, she could have no better representation than her attorney, Bob Corn-Revere, a bulldog Washington, DC, constitutional lawyer who got the Federal Communications Commission to reverse the $550,000 fine it levied on CBS following the untimely appearance of Janet Jackson's nipple at the Super Bowl.

Despite its legality, learning under duress has fallen out of favor in the world of higher ed. Cheek, whose father and grandfather were both professors, personally witnessed a radical change in the last decade. "I'm sure when my grandfather taught math, he didn't worry about how the students were doing," he says. "I'm sure he was thinking, Okay, I'm probably going to lose 40 or 50 percent or more of these students. Today it's more of a feel-good atmosphere for them." Though older generations like to rail at the current college generation as perpetually outraged "snowflakes," public university administrators may consider it necessary to cater to delicate sensibilities to keep students enrolled through graduation. As states have cut education budgets, operating costs are increasingly covered by tuition. LSU's funding has fallen by almost 40 percent since 2008—and student retention is optimized with such tools as "climate surveys" to measure overall contentedness. It's a system that treats the student as a customer to be delighted, and thus reflexively may frown upon the kind of rigor that can cause poor students to flunk out or, worse still, the kind of unpleasant encounters that can cause good students to transfer, as Rachel Ginn said she'd been considering.

Critics of LSU's actions also suspect that traditional Southern mores of female gentility played a role in Buchanan's quick ejection. "If some of these same utterances had been made by a man of any position whatsoever, the consequences would not have been the same," says Kevin Cope, an English professor and president of LSU's faculty senate, which overwhelmingly voted to censure Andrew, LSU president Alexander, and other administrators over Buchanan's firing. "In a way, this case is testing Southern ideas about gender roles."

If any major at LSU is frozen in the antebellum era, it's education, which is still occasionally referred to on campus as an MRS degree—that is, an ideal subject to study if your first priority is landing a husband. The women in the PK-3 program tend to be from more privileged backgrounds, and, because of Louisiana's atrocious public schools, graduates of private or parochial schools, according to two faculty members who asked to remain anonymous—they've become accustomed to a certain level of cosseting and protection from the coarser parts of life.

Laura Kipnis, a Northwestern University film professor whose latest book, Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus, chronicles her own and other academics' Kafka-esque adventures as subjects of Title IX inquisitions, feels a special kinship with Buchanan. "The complaint machinery is in such overdrive, it often seems that there's nobody who's ever offended by anything who doesn't complain about it," Kipnis says. "Our department is like this consumer paradise where we're constantly being told what students feel, and we need to adjust pretty much everything in response to their feedback." The 2015 Title IX investigation against Kipnis was precipitated by an essay she wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education that was critical of another Title IX case brought against a fellow professor. Two graduate students argued, among other things, that Kipnis's article had had a "chilling effect" on students' willingness to report sexual assault; after a 72-day investigation and a hearing, Kipnis was exonerated.

She's come to believe that the Obama administration's expansion of Title IX has given university administrators something that has always eluded them: a method to circumvent tenure protections to jettison professors who don't quite fit with the program. "There's no due process or proceduralism in this area, so if they want to get you, they can find a way," she says, noting that many Title IX cases blame sexual infractions for professors' dismissals but arise out of totally unrelated issues—she references one that began as a squabble over a tenure vote, another that started as a personal grudge, and a third that was payback from a jilted ex. (Whatever the inciting incident in Buchanan's case, LSU is an institution in constant financial crisis, one increasingly relying on cheaper, benefit-free adjuncts; ultimately, every professor can be reduced to a budget line item.)

Notwithstanding deep unease about the Title IX changes under Obama, Kipnis and other critics fear what the alternative might look like under a president who admitted that he kissed women without their consent and liked to "grab 'em by the pussy." Barely a month after becoming president, Trump rolled back Title IX–based guidelines that allowed transgender students to use whichever bathroom or locker room corresponded to their gender identity. Buchanan's case is being funded by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a nonprofit committed to fighting First Amendment abuses on college campuses. Though it describes itself as nonpartisan and its president and CEO, Greg Lukianoff, is an avowed liberal Democrat, the organization is often identified as conservative-leaning owing to the political affiliation of some of its biggest donors—Charles Koch, for example. Another FIRE backer is newly appointed Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who's given the group at least $10,000. DeVos did not respond to questions about whether she hoped to change Title IX rules or enforcement, but according to a statement issued by her press office, she "believes every student has the right to attend a school free from the threat of sexual assault" and is "working diligently and with fairness and compassion to deal with these diffi- cult cases."

Buchanan hugsFIRE's directorof litigation,CatherineSevcenko, atthe January2016 pressconferenceannouncing her lawsuit Courtesy of The Advocate

One person who is no fan of FIRE's litigation efforts is Catherine Lhamon, who was the assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education in the Obama administration. "[FIRE's] criticisms are ahistorical and a bit hysterical," she tells me. She says that the Office of Civil Rights' (OCR) legacy is one of important victories, such as the case of a male Southern Methodist University student who'd told the police that another male student raped him; subsequently, friends of the accused waged psychological warfare against the victim, outing him on campus, catcalling him across the dining hall, prank-calling him at his dorm. Without the OCR, Lhamon says, the young man would've been on his own.

In 2014, when the OCR first published a list of schools under investigation for Title IX violations, it ran 55 schools long. By the time Obama's term ended, the list had quadrupled in size. Lhamon contends that this doesn't correlate to changes in Title IX regulations but instead to a student population increasingly comfortable with complaining to the government. She hastens to point out that cases like Buchanan's and Kipnis's actually have nothing to do with the OCR, since it was the Title IX offices of LSU and Northwestern that acted.

She also dismisses the argument that publicly identifying schools under investigation, regardless of a complaint's merit, has spawned a culture of risk-averse Title IX coordinators who'll do anything to avoid federal inquiries that can go on for years and cost millions to defend. "That is a complete red herring," Lhamon says. "There are very inexpensive ways to satisfy the government. If the school elects to hire outside counsel to exponentially increase costs, that's the school's choice." As for what will happen under Trump, Lhamon says she has no more information than the "next American," though she adds that if she'd heard anyone on a college campus saying what Trump said to Billy Bush on a hot Access Hollywood mic, "we would have taken action."

"Dr. Buchanan is honestly probably my favorite teacher I've had at LSU," Elaina Vercher tells me. In the spring of 2012, Vercher, then a freshman in LSU's honors program, took Buchanan's course called "Life and Learning in the Digital Age." In the first class, Buchanan lectured about play—and mentioned sex as an adult form of play. It wasn't a big deal. "I mean, hell, we're grown-ups," she says. In fact, for her, a young woman who'd grown up in sleepy, small-town St. Amant, Louisiana, the class felt what college was supposed to feel like—a little dangerous, unexpected, and liberating. It made such an impression that she and other students in the course nominated Buchanan for the honors college's teaching award, a prize the professor received just six months before the university pulled her from the classroom.

Critics of LSU's actions say traditional Southern mores of femininity may have played a role in her quick ouster.

Samantha Gilmore was a member of "The Junior PK-3 Cohort" that sent the complaint letter, but it wasn't really from the entire cohort—neither she nor at least one other woman in the class, Abby Bradford, participated. "I did not want anything to do with it," Gilmore e-mails. "Terry was tough, but personally I'm glad she was because I feel like it made me the teacher I am today. She inspired me. This is my fourth year teaching and I certainly use things every day that were taught or brought up in classes with Terry." Gilmore found the assessment team meetings of particular value. "ATMs were stressful for sure," she writes. "But these meetings prepared me for the situations that come up as a teacher. Nothing is more nerve-racking than sitting in front of parents or administrators and trying to convince them that you are doing what's best for the students. The best thing Buchanan ever did for me was to push me to answer questions like 'Why would you do that in a classroom? What could you do better? How can you push the kids a little further to think about things?' "

Both Vercher and Gilmore showed up to testify for Buchanan at her hearing. It had been 15 months since Dean Andrew's e-mail, and during that time, Buchanan says she'd become a ghost in the department, invisible to everyone. Indeed, she said she'd heard that Andrew had instructed Buchanan's colleagues not to communicate with her about the case.

At the hearing, the three young women who'd complained about Buchanan weren't called to testify, nor was the superintendent who threatened to arrest her if she came back to his schools, Ed Cancienne. The upshot was that Buchanan was denied the opportunity to question her primary accusers. (Apart from Kaitlyn B., they wouldn't speak to me, either.) Per the university's rather bizarre bylaws, Buchanan could bring a lawyer but had to question witnesses herself. She faced off against Janna Oetting, a speech pathology professor tasked with presenting the university's case. (Oetting seemed to cotton to the role; when Gilmore testified that she wasn't offended by the word fuck, Oetting shot back, "Another word that people use is the n-word to refer to some minority groups. For some people that's…not offensive.") LSU dispatched three of its attorneys to watch the proceedings. During the 12-hour hearing, Buchanan says she chewed through two packs of Rolaids.

Witnesses raised questions about the credibility of several of the students who'd found Buchanan so noxious. Megan Miller, for one, was the mentor teacher for Kaitlyn B. and had been at the assessment meeting that ended in tears. Taping her was appropriate, Miller testified, a way to help prepare her for the scrutiny she'd get as a teacher. Miller actually was Kaitlyn's second mentor, assigned to her after the young woman told her LSU professors that her first female mentor made sexually inappropriate comments to her. Miller also testified that Kaitlyn failed to bring in assigned lesson plans, and when she "tried to give her criticism or advice, she started crying and giving me excuses"—all of which Kaitlyn denied in an interview.

Student C, the pregnant student, was one of the weakest members of the 2012 PK-3 cohort, Gilmore testified. Both she and Abby Bradford remembered that her ADHD diagnosis had been mentioned in nearly every class, but not because Buchanan introduced it. "[Student C] talked extensively about how she was utilizing" the accommodations her disability allowed, Bradford maintained. Buchanan tells me that she'd "never in a million years" refer to someone's disability as "bullshit"—her older son had reading issues as a boy. "But I'll tell you, if somebody used their disability as an excuse for shitty teaching, that is bullshit," she says. As for her insulting the methods of mentor teachers, Buchanan sighs. "These were crappy schools," she says. "Trust me, you wouldn't want your kids in these schools. I really have a lot of respect for the teachers. They did the best they could, but they're not good schools, and we were trying to train high-level teachers in that environment."

It wasn't even a close call for the faculty panel. Under LSU rules, firing a tenured professor requires extensive documentation—two unsatisfactory reviews in a row, for starters—with no effort on the professor's part to remedy transgressions. "There was nothing in her record to indicate that there was ever a problem," William Stickle, the faculty committee chair, tells me, though, he adds, if Cheek had written some things down through the years, the outcome might have been different. The panel concluded that Buchanan's "use of profanity...and sometimes sexually explicit 'jokes' " had indeed violated the LSU sexual harassment policy, but it wasn't a fireable offense, since "there was no evidence that this behavior was systematically directed at any particular individual."

As for her penance? "The stress already inflicted on Dr. Buchanan…is seen as an adequate punishment," the panel unanimously ruled. It also found fault with Cheek, for failing to address the problem, and with the university, for abandoning its own dismissal procedures. But LSU administrators ignored the panel's recommendation and in June 2015 fired Buchanan, citing sexual harassment. (Shortly after her dismissal, Dean Andrew removed Cheek as chairman of the department, and he promptly retired.) In Buchanan's suit, LSU may argue that President Alexander had a fiduciary responsibility to get rid of her since her actions threatened the university's very existence by imperiling its federal funding. Corn-Revere contends that the rationale won't hold up. "You can't just blame it on the feds," he says. "Federal guidelines do not trump the Constitution."

Alexander now probably wishes he'd paid closer attention to the Buchanan case. When he was deposed by Corn-Revere this January, he admitted that he hadn't read the hearing transcript, had no idea who'd testified, and chose to overrule the faculty panel largely based on the complaints of the local superintendent, Ed Cancienne. Alexander said in the deposition that he was particularly moved by Cancienne's assertion that Buchanan had said "pussy" three times in one of his schools, though he and the other LSU investigators admitted that they were under the impression that she'd used the word in the anatomical sense. In fact, according to testimony, Buchanan had asked teachers how they'd respond if a parent of one of their students got hostile and called them a "pussy." Citing the ongoing litigation, no LSU administrator involved in the case would speak to me, and faculty members were reluctant to talk on the record, for fear of reprisal. "There is corruption among some in the administration," one wrote. "I can't jeopardize my job."

Whatever the climate at the university, it's tempting to conclude that Buchanan's outbursts were at times pedagogically counterproductive, even bullying. At the same time, several recent studies suggest that students, especially the least able, rate more negatively instructors who demand more of them (and that tough women are doubly screwed, since by and large, female professors are judged more harshly than their male peers). Moreover, the concepts of tenure and academic freedom were born because, unchecked, universities may put financial matters first. In a seeming textbook illustration of this, a non- tenured engineering professor, Ivor van Heerden, sued LSU in 2010, charging that he was let go because the university believed his criticism of the Army Corps of Engineers' work with regard to Hurricane Katrina was threatening its federal grant money; while not admitting wrongdoing, LSU settled the case for $435,000 in 2013. The fear is that if students and administrators control faculty hiring and firing, universities will before long be stocked with professors incentivized to teach gut courses that never challenge the orthodoxy or speak truth to power.

"There is a sense of fear in that building of the dean," Buchanan tells me, over a barely touched plate of shrimp étouffée at The Chimes, the famous LSU beer hall near her former office in Peabody Hall. "Some of my faculty friends haven't been able to keep a relationship with me. It's scary for them to even be associated with me. This cannot continue. You can't do good work if you're scared to death of saying the wrong thing and getting fired." She begins to tear up for the umpteenth time that day but stops herself and narrows her eyes in anger, forming a fist around her tissue. "And if they can do it to me," she says, "they can do it to anybody."

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