I started a new Facebook group, and I urge all of you to join. It’s free, open to the public and anyone can post to the message board. It’s called ‘Juanita Perez Williams Hates Free Speech’ (see related Facebook group ‘Nancy Cantor Hates Free Speech’).

Why join? Well, I’m shooting for irony here, if you can’t tell.

Williams, the director of the Office of Judicial Affairs, shielded by the university’s Student Code of Conduct, used her authority to scare the crap out of a few freshmen girls when she called them into her office last semester. According to the girls, Williams told them they could be suspended or even expelled for their offense. But even worse, she told them they would be made an example of.

What could they have done to warrant such action against them? Cheating on an exam? Drinking or smoking in the dorms? Illegally trying to clone a human being in the Lyman Hall biology lab without Dr. Druger knowing?

Nope. One of the girls created a Facebook group called ‘Clearly Rachel doesn’t know what she’s doing ever,’ criticizing the teaching assistant in her academic writing class. The other three joined as officers. When the issue came to came to Judicial Affairs, the girls received a summons to Williams’ office.

So why was Williams able to threaten these girls with expulsion? Because according to the Student Code of Conduct, it’s an offense if someone within the university community feels threatened or harassed by another’s comment, whether it be verbal, written, via e-mail or instant message and yes, even Facebook.

Williams explained this in her statement to The Daily Orange, which ran on Wednesday, although she refused to comment for last week’s story. And she is right. No matter how you harass someone, it’s still harassment.

But implying that someone is bad at his or her job is not harassment. It’s just an opinion. And by golly, we live in a country that lets us share our opinions. Granted, our forefathers never knew Facebook would take off like it did, becoming a nationwide phenomenon and all, but I’m sure they would understand.

Besides, a million other things come to my mind that would fall under the category of harassment more than ‘Rachel doesn’t know what she’s doing.’ A few hypothetical names that would definitely be harassment: ‘I would like to hit Rachel with a baseball bat,’ or ‘I am seriously contemplating threatening Rachel’s well-being.’

Williams obviously overstepped the bounds of her authority in this case, and I’m sure there are several other instances that we simply don’t know about yet. It’s scary to think that someone with so much power did not analyze the situation further. She didn’t take the time to consider that the girls’ membership in the Facebook group was not harassment, but a harmless opinion. Instead, she took the word of a TA and used the situation to make an ‘example’ out of the four girls.

If SU instructors are too scared to be criticized by their own students, they are in the wrong profession. After all, it’s why the university makes each of us fill out surveys at the end of each semester for every professor we have. Go figure.