At first glance, a federal complaint is not the place one expects to find a human story. Legal documents are filled with careful phrasing and procedural language, and the people they describe are often reduced to categories: plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses, institutions. But beneath the court filings in this case there are real lives, and the words Mr. Khalil and other former student activists have chosen carry a heavy and painful weight. They have accused their own university of being deliberately indifferent to harassment that they faced on campus. “Deliberate indifference” is a legal standard, but it is also something far more intimate. It is the experience of walking into an office, explaining that you are scared, and then waiting for help that never quite arrives
