By Chris Quintana and Colin Campo
Did administrators miss the warning signs that allowed Joseph Tokosh to continue his act at three different colleges?
The geography professor didn’t hide his clown fetish or the fact that he sometimes indulged his urges by recruiting students as subjects. He posted regularly about it on social media.
“I have a facepaint fetish and convince the cute girls in my classes to let me paint their faces,” he once wrote.
Yet Joseph Tokosh held jobs at two colleges and was on the tenure track at a third before student journalists at Nicholls State University in Louisiana exposed his behavior. He submitted his resignation the same day their story was published.
His interactions with students and open discussion of his fetish happened in both mainstream and tailored digital spaces. He popped into Facebook groups geared toward new students and niche forums on websites like Reddit. He posted videos on YouTube. In one Reddit post on a forum meant to highlight hard-to-believe stories, Tokosh posted pictures of several women in white face paint…
