JUDGE APPROVES Anti-Male Bias Lawsuit Against Philly University of the Arts & Defamation Claim Against Accuser
Philadelphia’s University of the Arts can’t get out of a Title IX lawsuit by a tenured professor it fired without a hearing after a contentious Title IX investigation. U.S. District Judge Mark Kearney allowed the lawsuit by Harris Fogel to proceed to discovery “on his civil rights claim against the university.” The university punished Fogel for kissing a colleague from another university at a 2016 conference in Las Vegas, and for accidentally handing his hotel key card to an “aspiring female photographer” at a different conference weeks later in Houston. “An investigation into sexual harassment must apply uniform standards regardless of the complainant’s and accused’s sex,” Judge Kearney wrote.
The professor’s defamation and invasion of privacy claims against one of his accusers is also going forward under Kearney’s ruling last month. He’ll get discovery on those as well. The American Association of University Professors’ guidelines require a university to dismiss a faculty member only after “a hearing that accords with our procedural standards.” “As far as we know that did not occur here” said Hans-Joerg Tiede. While AAUP can’t comment “directly” on the situation, it “routinely” lodges protests with administrators when faculty members contact the group to report they were dismissed without a hearing, Tiede said.
Judge Kearney faulted the university right off the bat for misunderstanding Fogel’s Title IX claim. The administration argued that he was making a due process claim, “a theory not in the case,” the judge wrote. In order to evaluate Fogel’s “erroneous outcome” theory of Title IX, a subject that Kearney’s court of appeals has not addressed, the judge looked to other appeals and district courts that have “carefully outlined” the nature of the claim. He must allege he was “innocent and wrongfully found to have committed an offense,” by alleging particular facts that cast “articulable doubt” on the university’s finding against him. Those circumstances must also suggest that “gender bias was a motivating factor,” such as through “patterns of decision-making.” Judge Kearney cited a ruling in a similar lawsuit by an accused student against the University of Pennsylvania, where a judge found that allegations of “biased training materials and other pro-complainant bias” met the pleading threshold for an erroneous-outcome claim.
thecollegefix– Connor Ellington
