Ohio State University has placed an assistant professor on administrative leave after the faculty member — who is a part of a center that state legislators mandated to foster intellectual diversity on campus — physically clashed with a documentarian this week.
The episode, which happened on Monday, began when a filmmaker wanted to ask E. Gordon Gee, a former Ohio State president, additional questions following an interview with another journalist. Dr. Gee had walked into a room as Luke M. Perez, the assistant professor who is part of the university’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society, stood outside.
“He already said it was his last question, so we’re going to have to ask you guys to leave now,” Dr. Perez said, according to a video taken by the filmmaker, Mike Newman.
“Just one more?” Mr. Newman replied as he moved toward the room where Dr. Gee was.
“No,” Dr. Perez responded, moving to block the way of Mr. Newman, who appeared to be holding recording devices in each of his hands.
In a separate video posted by The Rooster, a political blog whose writer had just interviewed Dr. Gee, Dr. Perez reaches for the device in Mr. Newman’s left hand. Then he uses both of his hands to wrestle Mr. Newman to the ground.
“I told you not to put that in my face!” Dr. Perez exclaimed once Mr. Newman was on the ground, insisting that the documentarian had laid hands on him.
“We are aware of the incident, and it is very concerning,” Ben Johnson, an Ohio State spokesman, said in a statement. Mr. Johnson added that “the faculty member involved” had been put on administrative leave the day after the episode.
Mr. Johnson said the campus police were investigating, and that Mr. Newman and the Rooster reporter were not subjects of the inquiry.
Dr. Perez referred a request for comment to Mr. Johnson and another university spokesman. Mr. Newman told the NBC affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, where Ohio State is, that he had “feared for my life in the moment.”
“It happened so quick,” Mr. Newman said. “In the moment afterward, I was full of adrenaline, so I didn’t feel much. My jaw was hurting. My neck was a little sore. But after the adrenaline wore off, it felt like I got in a car accident.”
A lawyer for Mr. Newman, Rocky Ratliff, said in an interview on Thursday that the filmmaker “wants the guy criminally charged and terminated from his position.” Mr. Ratliff added that he and Mr. Newman were “definitely contemplating litigation because we just think it’s so egregious.”
Dr. Perez, whose listed areas of expertise include the ethics of war and international human rights, is among the roughly two dozen academics on the Chase Center’s faculty. The state government created the center with the budget that was signed into law in 2023 to “conduct teaching and research in the historical ideas, traditions and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society.”
The law says the center’s mission includes educating “students by means of free, open and rigorous intellectual inquiry to seek the truth” and affirming “the value of intellectual diversity in higher education.” Republican politicians across the country have championed such centers, arguing that they can promote free debate and Western values on campuses that they believe have become hubs of liberal ideology.
Before the altercation, Dr. Gee had fielded questions about a range of topics related to Ohio State, including whether he had ever spoken to Leslie Wexner, one of the university’s most important donors, about Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, was close to Mr. Wexner. In January, Dr. Gee criticized a push to strip Mr. Wexner’s name from facilities at Ohio State.
“This is the cancel culture gone wild,” Dr. Gee, who twice served as the university’s president, said in a radio interview. In the interview with The Rooster this week, Dr. Gee said he had “never” talked with Mr. Wexner about Mr. Epstein.
D.J. Byrnes, the Rooster writer who interviewed Dr. Gee and then witnessed the altercation, said Mr. Newman had intended to ask the former president about student debt.
Alan Blinder is a national correspondent for The Times, covering education.
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