The College Fix

Pro-marriage graduate banned from campus—on fairly flimsy pretexts

Providence College, in Rhode Island, has a P.R. problem on its hands. The school recently banned a recent graduate from its campus, while the vice president of the institution took out a restraining order against that same student, on pretexts that can best be described as flimsy.

The controversy actually began earlier this semester, when senior Michael Smalanskas was subject to intimidation on campus, some of it violent, after posting a display on a dormitory bulletin board that promoted the Catholic Church’s one-man, one-woman teaching on marriage. Smalanskas was subject to at least one rape threat, and his display was subsequently torn down by angry students. Smalanskas’s safety on campus was apparently in jeopardy to the extent that security moved him to several different living spaces during the worst of it.

In response, the school’s Vice President, Kristine Goodwin, sent out an email addressing the situation that was tepid at best and equivocally hostile at worst. While stressing the “need to treat each other with respect at all times,” Goodwin also implied that Smalanskas’s poster took the Church’s teaching on marriage “out of context” (it did not). Goodwin’s email subsequently encouraged students to attend a pro-LGBTQ demonstration on campus organized in response to Smalanskas’s display. Call us crazy, but: There is something deeply unseemly about a Catholic school administrator falsely accusing a student of erroneous faith teaching, and then essentially encouraging students to protest him, after he has been subject to violent threats—all because he promoted orthodox Church doctrine. 

The controversy continued this month, when Goodwin hit Smalanskas with a restraining order and the university itself banned him from campus. The justification for these orders was dubious at best: Goodwin claims that Smalanskas “glared” at her “for 5-8 seconds” at a Commencement Mass, something Smalanskas denies. She also said that Smalanskas yelled at her after the Mass, criticizing her for response to the marriage poster affair earlier in the year. (Smalanskas does not deny doing this, but points out, not unreasonably, that Goodwin herself admitted that Smalanskas’s words were “not expressly threatening”).

Even the most uncharitable assessment of this situation fails to justify why a young man should be subject to the dire and extreme measures that the school and its vice president have foisted upon him. Staring at an administrator for a few seconds—if it did indeed happen—is hardly grounds for a restraining order. And while we would advise students to refrain from loudly and publicly confronting administrators with which they are unhappy, there is simply no indication, even within Goodwin’s own account, that Smalanskas counted as a threat to her.

This is an embarrassment for Providence College. Unless there is some additional information here that has been withheld, there is no indication that these measures have been warranted. They should be lifted. A young man should not have to face hostility from a Catholic college’s student body for promoting Catholic teaching; and he certainly should not have to face institutional hostility from that same college for what appears to be no good reason.

MORE: Pro-marriage student banned from Catholic campus accuses school of ‘revenge behavior’

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