Cairo – Several students and graduates of Faculty of Media at the Cairo University, launched a hashtag called #TryYasinLashin after circulating a voice recording of a professor threatening and harassing a female student, and asking her to be filmed naked. The recording went viral on social media along with the hashtag. Yasin Lashin, a Cairo University professor of Public Relations Department at Faculty of Media, was charged on April 7, 2014 with bribery, blackmailing students and profiteering from his post as professor. Former president of Cairo University, Dr. Jaber Nassar, then referred him to the Central Legal Department for investigating the charges against him. Social media activists said—as heard from the recording—that Lashin threatened the girl at gunpoint and asked her to sign with her name a disclaimer on his behalf that he was financially helping her, and that he had never sexually harassed her or whatsoever. He also asked her to write that she lied in her claims against him and that, according to her voice recording, she had willingly "offered herself to him." On Twitter, the hashtag is trending as No. 1 in Egypt. Facebook users also launched similar campaigns denouncing that professor's pervasion and derangement. This was not the first incident of its kind that stirred up much controversy about Lashin on campus. In February 2014, dozens of students from the Faculty of Media, Cairo University, Public Relations Department, staged a protest denouncing Lashin's profiteering and exploitation of their dire conditions. They said that he sells his textbooks "prohibitively expensive;" and those who cannot afford the price, would definitely fail the exams. The students also pointed out that Lashin has always been a foul-mouthed by uttering profanities to students in the lecture hall with no respect for his students, the campus, or at least for the position he represents.
