You can go to our
Newsletters.
Or search for a word here:
Case Updates:
Pat Washington vs. San Diego State University
Washington experienced both race and gender discrimination in the Women's Studies Department's failure to promote her to tenure. The department first changed the requirements for promotion, greatly raising the number of published articles required. After Washington met these inflated requirements, the department voted against her. This vote may have been in retaliation for her challenging the chair's differences in treatment of minority and majority graduate students. Before this challenge, Washington's work received positive evaluations, and after it was disparaged. (For more background, see
Spring 2003,
Fall 2003,
Spring-Fall 2004,
Spring 2005,
Fall 2005, and
Spring-Fall 2006 Newsletters.)
The case was dismissed on summary judgment, that is, the court did not allow the case to come to trial. The court's reasoning was that the department did not discriminate by disliking Washington, and that this dislike was reason enough to deny tenure. Appeals of this decision failed.
[Editorial comment: How much of this failure was due to the flaws of Washington's first attorneys, and how much was due to the conservative nature of San Diego's courts? It seems such a clear failure of justice.]
Charlene McMahon vs. Carroll College
Chemist Charlene McMahon held a tenure-track position at Carroll College (a small college in Wisconsin), was recommended for tenure, but denied this promotion in 2002, although her qualifications were equivalent or better than those of the two men in her department who received promotion to tenure in 2003. She filed for gender and disability discrimination (at the time, she was pregnant which is classified legally as a disability). The College has retaliated by refusing to consider McMahon for the non-tenure-track job that replaced her tenure-track position. In 2005, the EEOC ruled in McMahon's favor. Mediation was attempted, but the College offered only a small monetary settlement. (For further background, see
Fall 2003,
Spring-Fall 2004,
Spring 2005,
Fall 2005 and
Spring-Fall 2006 Newsletters.)
As of January 2006, McMahon's legal paperwork and that of the College has been filed, and they await a court date.
In the meantime, the faculty union, which formed at Carroll partly as a result of seeing tenure-track jobs become non-tenured jobs, has won an election to bargain for the faculty. The National Labor Relations Board (NRLB) has said the union is a legitimate bargaining unit. However, the NRLB has not yet issued the order saying that Carroll must negotiate.
It is thought that the NRLB is waiting for a decision in a somewhat similar case involving Point Park University in Pittsburg. In this case, the university took the NRLB to court for declaring the union a legitimate bargaining unit. The Federal Appeals court has said that the NRLB must give more rationale for their decision. The decision as to whether the Point Park University union is legitimate depends on the results of court review of the amended rationale.
Carroll's faculty union feels the local Labor Relations Board has provided an adequate rationale for the decision that it is a legitimate bargaining unit. But there is, still, no movement on the part of the NRLB. A factor in this decision may be that three out of the five members of the NRLB are Bush appointees, thus presumably supportive of institutions, not unions. Time is on the side of the college, delay weakens the union.
However, there are some reasons for optimism. The College Trustees had been very supportive of the president whose steps to abolish tenure precipitated this case. This president retired in June of 2006 and a new president has been appointed who appears open to change.
One positive outcome of McMahon's case appears to be Carroll College's current practice of advertising its non-tenure-track positions as such.
Garcia et al. and Barber et al. vs. Regents of the University of California
As of March 2007, settlement of a class-action case at Los Alamos National Laboratories (LANL) is pending. LANL has agreed, subject to the approval of the judge in charge, to pay $12 million as part of a settlement.
The case combines two class-action suits brought by female and Hispanic employees that alleged discrimination. At the time of the alleged discrimination, LANL was under the management of the University of California. (For details, see
Spring-Fall 2006 Newsletter.)
A Web site with information about the settlement has been created:
www.lanlclassactionsettlement.com
Graciela Chichilnisky vs. Columbia University
This legal case has long roots in the history of Columbia's treatment of Graciela Chichilnisky, UNESCO Professor of Mathematics and Economics. For fifteen years, she has fought gender discrimination and retaliation for herself, and, in regard to salary, for all the female faculty. (For further background see
Fall 2003,
Spring-Fall 2004,
Spring 2005,
Fall 2005 and
Spring-Fall 2006
Newsletters.)
In 1995, Chichilnisky won a $500,000 settlement and equalization of her salary. Since then Columbia has both reneged on elements of the settlement and retaliated against her. In 2000, Chichilnisky got a restraining order when Columbia dismantled her offices, and began litigating a second time.
That second case has most recently been in pretrial motions in the New York State Supreme Court, with Judge Leland DeGrasse presiding. Chichilnisky's attorney, Robert Felix, had amended her complaint to include punitive damages against Columbia, as well as disability discrimination.
In response, Columbia filed a motion asking for unprecedented sanctions against Chichilnisky on procedural issues, including dismissal of her case because of her behavior during litigation. For example, Chichilnisky reported the date of a second family emergency as the first, an understandable confusion because they were only weeks apart. Columbia also asks the court to allow a counter-suit against Chichilnisky (charging her with owing them money for the time she was on leave) without permitting a defense. In effect, Columbia was trying to keep Chichilnisky's case from coming to court and to prevent her from responding to the countersuit.
On February 15, 2006, Chichilnisky learned that the court had found against a motion which would have denied her the right to sue. The judge has put the case under a special referee to deal with disputes regarding discovery, and promised to set a trial date in April 2007.
Chichilnisky reports that her attorney says this ruling has set an important precedent. Columbia had attempted a rare and extremely aggressive move designed to deprive Chichilnisky of basic constitutional rights, but failed. Columbia's outside lawyers, Proskauer and Rose are the largest, most aggressive and powerful law firm in New York, known for their scorched-earth techniques against plaintiffs such as labor unions. For Chichilnisky's case, a Proskauer lawyer works with a team of ten, all financed by Columbia's insurance.
Motions for punitive damages and disability discrimination are still pending. These are based on new facts unearthed by discovery. These show that Columbia used Chichilnisky's Lyme disease as an opportunity to cancel and remove from her over two million dollars in research grants. In spite of the fact that Chichilnisky had told Columbia that she would be able to continue her promised research, Columbia wrote to her grantors without informing her and stated that her illness did not allow her to do research. Using illness to destroy work and professional credibility is considered disability discrimination.
Having eliminated her grants, Columbia eliminated Chichilnisky's research group offices, without explanation, throwing out her computers and losing or destroying her records. These actions were the impetus for the present suit.
Recent acts of disability discrimination included denying her an on-campus office even after being informed that hip dysplasia and weakness from her Lyme disease made the physical exertion of carrying teaching materials around campus painful and difficult.
However, individuals at Columbia have been supportive. A new department chair has given Chichilnisky an on-campus office. Together with various deans, the new chair has acknowledged Chichilnisky's contributions to her students and the university. And, Chichilnisky was recently elected to Columbia's University Senate.
Her case has been adopted by the American Association of University Women-Legal Advocacy Fund with generous financial support. More recently, it was adopted by Feminists Against Academic Discrimination (FAAD), also with financial aid.
FAAD was started with seed money from Annette Kolodny from the settlement of her discrimination case against the University of New Hampshire. (Kolodny's experiences are described in "I Dreamed Again That I was Drowning," Spring 1999 Newsletter.) On June 28, 2007, faad will honor Chichilnisky with a "Speaking Out for Justice Award" at its conference in St. Charles, Illinois.
The case has received attention from outside of academe. Erin Essenmacher, a documentary film-maker, has begun work on a film on discrimination in academia against female scientists. Chichilnisky and her daughter, Natasha (a science student at Columbia), were both interviewed for this film. In 2006, Chichilnisky was designated one of the ten most influential Hispanics in the United States. In June of 2006, CBS News at 5:00 (channel 2 in New York City), ran a story on her case. In January 2007, CNN ran a story about the case on its national network.
-wage@wage.org-