Legal Issue, but not Local

My sister, Cathy Kemp, has a Ph.D. in philosophy (she also has a JD, but does not practice) and teaches philosophy, currently at Penn State. She and her husband migrated from Denver to central PA when Penn State offered her husband (Mitchell) the chair of its philosophy department, and offered Cathy a tenure track position as well.

Seemed to be a great move, after leading a successful department at the University of Colorado at Denver, this was a step up for Mitchell. But then Mitchell noticed that some of the philosophy graduate students were experiencing rough treatment by some of the senior members of the faculty. The treatment seemed to be focused on minority and female students, so Mitchell followed the recommended course of action, and turned the issue over to the campus office of affirmative action. 11 days later, Mitchell was demoted from the chair position.

He went through the EEOC, and last fall filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming retaliatory demotion against his employer. Needless to say, working for an employer who you are embroiled in litigation with simultaneously has not been a pleasant experience for Cathy and Mitchell. Seeing as this has been going on for over 2 years now, I wonder how they have held up this long.

Anyway, although the filing of the lawsuit makes this a mater of public record, I have not widely discussed the issue, but the central PA media has finally pick up the story (probably because Penn State’s women’s basketball coach is under fire for discrimination at the moment):

Mitchell Aboulafia, 54, of Harris Township, has said that Susan Welch, dean of the College of the Liberal Arts, and an associate dean illegally demoted him in March 2004. They did so, Aboulafia has claimed in a civil complaint, because he raised and reported sex-discrimination worries in the college.

Aboulafia led the philosophy department from July 2003 until his demotion.

During that period, according to the 23-page complaint, Aboulafia received “numerous, troubling reports” about some faculty members.

The reports alleged that some students, teaching assistants and young faculty members were subjected to discrimination and harassment, according to the complaint. Those reports suggested that the behavior was in violation of federal and state law and university policy, Aboulafia has claimed.

His complaint reads: “… many of the most serious reports involved one particular senior professor, who oversaw the academic work of graduate students in his role as a teacher and dissertation director ….”

That professor is not named in the complaint.

When Aboulafia took the reports to Welch and Ron Filippelli, then the associate dean in the college, the deans did not take “any meaningful action to address these issues,” the complaint reads.

“Instead, both Dean Welch and Associate Dean Filippelli appeared to be more concerned with protecting the department’s senior faculty members who were named in the reports than they were with protecting students, graduate teaching assistants or junior faculty members …,” it reads.

. . . .

Aboulafia declined to comment for this article. In his complaint, lodged in August in federal court, he said that he contacted the university Office of Affirmative Action with his concerns on March 11, 2004.

Ken Lehrman, who heads that office, told Aboulafia “that he had acted properly in contacting” the office, according to the complaint.

Four days later, Aboulafia has said, he received e-mails from Welch and Filippelli. They told him that “such matters should be kept within the college,” according to the complaint.

Lehrman could not be reached Tuesday.

But the university provost office told Welch and Filippelli that their responses to Aboulafia were improper, Aboulafia has claimed.

Then, on March 22, 2004, Welch demoted Aboulafia from his position with little explanation, according to the complaint.

By September, Aboulafia filed a charge with the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission. The U.S. Department of Justice, in July, granted Aboulafia the right to sue.

Link.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 6:26 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.