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MARGIT STANGE VS. UC REGENTS AND UCD: SETTLEMENT
Plaintiff Margit Stange, a feminist literary scholar who filed a federal gender
bias complaint
after she was denied tenure in the UCD English department, was awarded $600,000.
The out-of-court settlement was reached on June 27, three months before the
scheduled trial date.
The Regents spent an estimated $350,000 defending the case;
Stange plans to find out the exact sum.
This award is considerable. Because the case was filed in federal court,
had it gone to
trial punitive damages would have been capped at $300,000 and compensatory
damages would have reflected Stange´s limited lifetime earning potential
as a midlife
English professor.
.
Stange´s tenure suit helped bring to light persistent, uncorrected
bias in the
Davis English Department. In 1998, English graduate students and faculty
successfully
demanded that a feminist woman be appointed chair, citing the history of
hostility
toward departmental women that culminated in Stange´s suit.
Stange was terminated in the spring of 1997. Her tenure battle began with
a 1995
departmental review which Stange answered by arguing that her tenure
qualifications
were not being fairly evaluated and that gender bias was evident. Stange
demonstrated
that she had strong support from all the department´s women and from
experts
in her field. She won positive tenure recommendations from both campus review
committees. Davis faculty and student supporters petitioned UC President
Atkinson
for a review and Stange presented campus administrators with exhaustive
documentation
of gender bias problems in her department (
see Spring 1998
Newsletter).
However, Vice Chancellor Carol Tomlinson-Keasey, now chancellor of the
Merced campus,
and Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef took the unusual step of overruling the Campus
Committee
on Academic Personnel to support Stange´s opponents. Vanderhoef reportedly
said, in
response to protests by two women faculty, that "the irritant"
(Stange) should
be "removed" to restore peace. .
.
Along the way, Stange also appealed procedural matters to the campus
Committee on Privilege and Tenure, set up a Web site, and got coverage in the
campus and local newspapers. WAGE and the
National Women´s Studies
Association provided advice and moral support. NWSA also awarded support funds.
For further details about this case and other academic bias struggles, see
Stange´s Web site:
www.stange-support.org.
-wage@wage.org-