A professor at a small Louisiana university is alleged to have engaged in some downright creepy “extra credit” activities with some of his female students until he was exposed by the campus newspaper. Now he’s out of a job.
Joseph Tokosh was a geography professor at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, La. And his particular fetish involved choosing certain students to paint their faces in clown makeup.
He would then post the photos on social media and in places that were clown fetish-friendly on the internet.
“I have a facepaint fetish and convince the cute girls in my classes to let me paint their faces,” Tokosh once wrote in a post on Reddit.
Nicholls State was not the first place Tokosh had employed the extra credit ruse.
He was reported for the same behavior during his time teaching at Kent State University, where at least one student alleged that Tokosh became aggressive when she refused the “assignment.”
“I felt like the school would want to know about it,” Levan told USA Today about reporting Tokosh to school officials in 2018. “I thought maybe they could prevent anything bad from happening since other girls would go with him.”
Last spring, student journalists at Nicholls State began to look into rumors that Tokosh was engaged in the same coercive activities – using the lure of extra credit to entice students to paint their faces for him or, in some cases, let him do it – at their own school.
Reporters at The Nicholls Worth found there was a user named “Joeography” on Reddit posting about his “clown fetish.” Tokosh had used that same word in relation to his class material.
Nicholls Worth Editor-in-Chief Sally-Anne Torres spoke with six different female students about their interactions with Tokosh.
“It wasn’t just this innocent thing that a lot of these girls thought it was,” Torres told the New York Post. “As a professor or teacher, that is somebody students are supposed to trust. He used his power to ruin that trust and to do these things, and that made me angry for them.”
A story titled “Geography professor suspended immediately, students allege sexual harassment” ran in the March 27 addition of the school newspaper. Tokosh was then confronted by student reporters from the school’s television station.
“That’s an assignment in one of my classes where they actually come up with their own face paint and makeup design inspired by a culture and they implement it,” he told KNSU.
Tokosh, however, submitted his resignation the same day, even as more students came forward with stories of painting their faces at his request.
So far, no criminal charges have been filed against Tokosh. He has also declined to comment publicly on the matter.