I Am Suing UCLA
bariweiss.substack.com
bariweiss.substack.com
This is an unfortunate situation where largely things worked the way they were supposed to. Somebody raised a stink. The administration took time to investigate it. Found nothing and within 3 weeks dismissed the complaints. It sucks, but sometimes shit happens. Especially in academia.
The problem appears to be that the 3 week suspension led to the professor’s income from unrelated work being affected. I highly doubt that this lawsuit will succeed. This is the process everyone in academia (and if they are lucky in private companies as well...private companies don’t even promise an investigation...their at will contracts mean they can simply terminate your position) agrees to and it works well, as it did in this case.
The issue lies with the private companies the professor makes money from outside the university, who he has at will and temporary contracts with, which allow him to be terminated for no reason.
Of course, the irony is that contrary to the professor’s claims, the entity he is suing completely protected him. It’s the at will contracts with the private companies that are the cause of his loss of income.
If UCLA operated like a private company he wouldn’t have had a suspension with an investigation. His contract would simply have been terminated.
Look, in my opinion, the initial ask from the student was completely absurd and ridiculous, especially in a class where the only thing graded is the final. I understand the student's motivations and sympathize, but sending a form letter was inappropriate and the ask, as I said, in my opinion, is ridiculous.
That said, the professor, a professional who boasts 40 years of experience, used poor judgment with his response. That doesn't make him wrong, per se, but it was poor judgment to reply in that way, especially given the sociopolitical climate last summer. A guy who only uses non-tenured (and thus, poor paying) UCLA role to get clients for his external businesses should know better than engaging in this sort of stuff. Again, it doesn’t make him wrong, but it was poor judgment.
The social media flare-up that the university felt compelled to address happened because students shared the information. The university made an investigation, found he didn’t do anything wrong, and he faced no disciplinary action. But the fallout that social media flare-up had on his own reputation, to the point he lost moonlighting contracts, didn’t happen because the university tweeted some sanguine tweets about respect and equality and that an investigation was under way. His name was never even mentioned in those statements. People who fired him, fired him because of the Change.org stuff, not UCLA Anderson's tweets.
I think it is unfortunate that a benign email (even if it was poor judgment to send) went viral the way it did. But I fail to see how the university, or anyone, is legally culpable for private companies choosing not to retain his services.
If the e-mail was (as you stated) "benign" and what the student asked was (again, your own assessment) "completely absurd and ridiculous" then suspending someone (even with pay) pending investigation could easily be seen as an overreaction in court.
The professor also made a case that his employer had something to gain from this overreaction. And he is making the case he lost something due to this overreaction.
According to the complaint, warnings by UCLA to not take action against the professor, were ignored. So it was not "an unfortunate situation where largely things worked the way they were supposed to".
He was placed on administrative leave so the university could investigate the issue — that isn’t the same as a suspension. It also completely aligns with HR's comment that “further inquiry is warranted before action can be taken.” An inquiry happened, the non-tenured professor was found to have not violated any of the guidelines and was reinstated.
The publicity surrounding his email does appear to have had an averse effect on his contracts unrelated to his post at UCLA, that is absolutely true. I’m still not seeing how him losing business opportunities because of bad publicity, caused in part by his own actions, is the university's fault. I agree with OP.
"So, even though a university administrator made it clear the university could not take any action against me — on the grounds that there was no known cause for taking such action — Anderson’s Dean Antonio Bernardo took matters into his own hands. He apparently reasoned that a well-timed publicity stunt might distract attention away from the school’s reputation as an inhospitable place for persons of color — to say nothing of its plummeting rankings in U.S. News and World Report and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Without any deliberation I was aware of, Bernardo suspended and banned me from campus. Then, like a well-choreographed dance, the Anderson administration started attacking my character on social media. As I documented in my legal claim, on June 3, one day after I received the first email, the Anderson School’s Twitter account sent out a message: “Respect and equality for all are core principles at UCLA Anderson. It is deeply disturbing to learn of this email, which we are investigating. We apologize to the students who received it and to all those who have been as upset and offended by it as we are ourselves.” This implied I didn’t believe in equality for all — when that was exactly what I believed and continues to believe. "
That is, if you're doing an investigation of something against internal advice, the appropriate response on twitter is nothing or something very nonspecific, like "we have no comment".
The reason for this is exactly what this lawyer is claiming.
My prediction is this gets settled out of court.
People here are a bit glib in glazing over what constitutes potential libel or at least libel in the pragmatic sense.
Aside from the fact that a 'suspended and banned from campus' is, in and of itself an action which cause damages - the specific messaging and wording used i.e. "Deeply disturbing email" are acts of condemnation.
It's interesting that the professors Unions have not weighed in on this - why would they allow Administrators, and Students to damage profs. with these actions, without recourse?
If the slandered him or unfairly harmed his reputation, they could very well be liable for economic loss.
The copy-and-pasted emails contained in the complaint also sound like slander to me.
We don’t know if the university followed policy or not. Nothing in the complaint proves that it didn’t, and it could very well be read that it did, based on the facts he made in the claim.
Except, he doesn’t claim any of that in the article.
He claims he lost his private contracts because he was suspended. Which I would be highly surprised if it wasn’t just straightforward policy.
At least the college I studied at 2 decades ago had a pretty mechanical suspension policy while investigations were done for certain category of complaints from students (at the time this was usually sexual misconduct, but racism/sexism/etc were probably also included).
No, not really. He claims that he lost the lion's share of his income because the Anderson administration not only suspended him but also started attacking his character on social media based on the meritless accusations of racism.
From the blog post:
> You see, most of my income comes not from teaching at UCLA but from consulting to law firms and other corporations. Several of those firms dropped me after they got wind that I’d been suspended — the better to put distance between themselves and a “racist.” That cost me the lion’s share of my annual income. The students involved in this escapade may have moved on to other causes. I have not. I’m not sure I ever will.
His blog post is quite clear on the path he is taking the law suit: he was subjected to attacks and abuse for not complying with requests to grant special priviledges to some students, and the Anderson administration proceeded to throw him under the bus as a scapegoat to avoid their institutional pattern of non-inclusiveness. Consequently, the actions taken by the Anderson administration ultimately caused him to lose the lion's share of his income.
That's a stretch. A tenured professor at a public university not losing his job over some drivel hardly constitutes as being protected.
Please let's not go there.
The initial request was pretty bold and condescending.
The response was slightly ill mannered, but that's just tone.
Both the request and response were within bounds however.
'The problem' is not 'the Professor' - it's an institution that enables radical elements of the student body who generally don't speak for the group at large, or who intimidate otherwise, to dictate authoritarian terms. This is due to fear, the fact that students are seen as 'customers' instead of students, and, frankly that a not insignificant number of faculty side with the students.
By your own account is seems reasonable the prof didn't do something very wrong, in which case, the reasonable thing to do would have him publish another, conciliatory note and then move on.
The Prof. was arbitrarily maligned, frankly in trying to uphold what he believed was actual law, I don't know why you would think that companies are protected from defamation/libel/slander. We'll have to see how that works out.
[1] https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/personal-injury/harm-to-reputat...
The closest I could find was:
> Moreover, the Dean of the Anderson School, Defendant Antonio Bernardo (“Bernardo”), disparaged Plaintiff to alumni and the general public based on the private communications between Plaintiff and the student who had requested preferential race-based grading policies (“Student”). Dean Bernardo even went so far as to publicly disclose the adverse personnel action the School had improperly imposed on Plaintiff.
The private communications he is referring to here is his emails with the student. Which isn’t private if the student chooses to reveal it, like he did in this case. I mean, there’s absolutely 0 legal expectation of privacy in an email sent to someone, but there is hardly even an ethical expectation of privacy if the dispute is based on the email sent.
But here’s the thing. Even here he doesn’t use the term defamation, because he knows that’s a legal term completely unsupported by the facts. Speaking badly of somebody is not illegal (and adds even more irony because if that was illegal it would chill public discourse far more than losing private at will contracts with 3rd party entities, when the party you’re suing decided to investigate a claim and then cleared you of it completely).
" it would chill public discourse "
Well it might 'chill' and restrain Universities ability to have someone 'suspended and investigated' in a public spectacle, and to communicate those issues to alumni, which is possibly materially damaging to individuals careers.
It's disturbing to read the comments here about what is 'chilling' because the obvious irony here is that this man did absolutely nothing wrong, and has suffered material damages due to a brigade of ideologues. I don't think we should be concerned about the Unis ability to sanction profs.
This is evidence of a form of 'cancel culture', in this case private interests cancelled contracts and probably made it more difficult for him to pursue future contracts with other parties more than likely out of concerns of public outrage as opposed to any real moral condemnation. Everyone at the University has taken note, surely there's a 'chill' on campus.
Do you think profs are going to likely speak their minds and have reasonable discourse about these difficult issues? Or will they avoid having any opinion other than what is sanctioned by the most radical elements on campus so as to ensure there will be no uproar?
It's deeply illiberal.
The conversation should be about appropriately addressing the concerns of the students (whether accommodating their demands or not), and then protecting everyone, staff, students included from inappropriate outrage. The University probably should be contacting the firms that cancelled contracts towards asking them to reinstate the prof in good standing i.e. repairing the situation, and then repairing the culture on campus to allow for reasonable dialogue.
That did not make the professor wrong. Like I said, I don’t think the professor was wrong to say what he did.
But more relevantly, UCLA did not think the professor was wrong. That’s why they cleared him after their investigations.
And they did not slander him either.
That’s why the complaint isn’t either about UCLA punishing him, nor about UCLA or a UCLA employee slandering him.
The complaint is about private companies terminating his employment because he went through a standard UCLA investigative procedure. One which he agreed to and is common across the country.
The only thread his entire argument stands on is that through the process a couple of non binding entities recommended the investigative actions not be taken. But no one is gonna fault an entity for investigating something, and they will definitely not find it illegal.
The thing is - it was the act of suspension and subsequent investigation which resulted in material loss of revenue.
Ergo, it's possible that this may very well have been the act of libel itself - in much the same way that being publicly accused of some terrible crime, and 'stick' to your public image.
I wonder if for such things, it behoves the institution to not make material changes to a situation, and that such investigations must be private. A 'suspension' is a condemning act in and of itself.
In Canada, right now, the Army General in charge of vaccine distribution was given the punt after someone made a sexual harrassment claim dating back to 1988. He lost his post and suffered quite a bit of damage, the results of the investigation may very well be nill (maybe not, we don't know), it doesn't matter, the damage is done. He's now suing the Government to be reinstated, but it's 100% politics at this point.
Accusations of racism are really, really serious, perhaps we should handle them differently.
He claims the act of suspension is what led to him losing his private contracts. Not slander or being maligned.
Suspension is a normal part of university investigations that everyone agrees to. The fact that hoti are companies that employ him are able to use that to terminate his at will employment or contract with them says nothing about UCLA doing anything wrong.
UCLA, the entity he is suing, reinstated him without any consequences within 3 weeks.
I’ve personally been suspended for a lot less (actually, for being the victim) in a college setting.
UCLA acted against him - by irresponsibility suspending him for issues regarding supposed racial insensitivity, which were without merit.
His suspension caused him to lose revenue, hence the problem.
The suspension could be a form of libel i.e. false information published about him, causing him damages.
I should add that it's obviously more complicated if he's 'cleared' of something but the libelous damanges linger anyhow.
The real issue here was that some students were affected emotionally by something significant before an exam and this particular student was asking that leniency be shown towards them, if you strip away demographic descriptors. My response to this would have been to ask the student to refer _any_ students affected by the events to contact me to determine leniency on an individual basis. It puts onus on that student to refer people. If they were only looking to stir the pot, they likely wouldn't have referred anyone and that would have been the end of it. If there were students referred who were not in the right headspace to handle the exam at 100%, then that's fine. At my university, we had exemptions for exams based on personal circumstances. I wouldn't see this as any different from that.
With that aside, I do believe this particular student was being an ideological charlatan and that their request was not sincere. The excerpts in the post read like bait imo. This seems congruent with immediacy of the outrage that followed, and the petition.
edit: grammar mistake
That being said, I can’t fault the professor for his response. It’s natural and human to do so.
And clearly UCLA also agreed because within 3 weeks all the complaints were dismissed despite the campus uproar the professor describes.
The professor's point is that no professor should have to walk through mine fields when rejecting demands for special priviledges, specially if it's the school administration laying out said mines instead of actively doing their best to defuse them.
Probably navigating conflicts like this.
But what might be easily lost because of the strange way this article is written is that UCLA agreed with the professor. There was absolutely no disciplinary action taken against him.
It sucks that he was suspended for 3 weeks, but colleges have to deal with a situation where young vulnerable barely adults are entering completely new environments without their parents protecting them for the first time in their lives and as a result have a disciplinary system that, rightfully, requires investigations of almost all complaints.
That meant the professor got 3 weeks off with pay, while the college investigated and found nothing wrong with his actions.
That’s how the system works, and it actually usually works well, as it did in this instance.
The problem the professor has is not with UCLA that did everything right. The problem he has is with the private companies with whom he has at will/contractual terms of employment. These companies do not adhere to the rules that UCLA did which allowed them to have him continue as before after a reasonable investigation. They simply fired him.
And American law allows companies to fire (non unionized) workers without cause (unless the reason is a protected category, such as race...for example, if he was fired for being white..but he wasn’t. They fired him for being suspended, as he states in the article). But suing a bunch of private companies in a lawsuit that was bound to fail would neither win him any money, would make him look worse, and would not allow him to get a right wing celebrity to feature his story as part of their deeply flawed cancel culture narrative.
My wife got pulled out of undergrad to go drive trucks in Ramadi during 2004/2005.
To argue that college student need to be protected from words is the height of privilege.
A diverse college population includes all sort of people, of all sorts of ages and backgrounds. Some will have gone already gone through hell in their lives, and come back stronger. Some will be trying to start a new life. For some, this will be their first time away from their hometown, at a university that has as many people as their hometown did.
Does this mean that college students need to be protected? No. Instead, I make two suggestions/requests:
1. When starting from nothing, assume the best of intentions.
2. Assume your email will be read in the worst possible tone. Corollary: Don't be an asshole in your emails.
If that's truly the case, then the parents failed.
I disagree with that statement, based on the article's paragraph starting "Without any deliberation I was aware of…"
The big question is, were the actions of and statements by Anderson made as part of a normal, documented procedure for this sort of occurrence? Were these actions taken in consultation with, or under the direction of, the relevant disciplinary authorities?
If not, then I think Anderson does have a case to answer to.
> The student then requested that the final be a “no harm” exam — meaning it should be counted only if it boosted one’s grade. “This is not a joint effort to get finals canceled for non-Black students, but rather an ask that you exercise compassion and leniency with Black students in our major.” (As I noted in my legal complaint, the student clarified, in a subsequent conversation with a university investigator, that he “intended that the requested adjustments apply to Black students and not the class generally.”)
> Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota.
> Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we’ve been having online classes only? Are there any students of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half?
> Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they probably are especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might possibly be even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not. My TA is from Minneapolis, so if you don’t know, I can probably ask her.
> Can you guide me on how I should achieve a “no-harm” outcome since our sole course grade is from a final exam only?
> One last thing strikes me: Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the “color of their skin.” Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK’s admonition?
Definitely a ridiculous response to a fairly well reasoned email. However, he definitely could have left out the sentence comparing the suffering of people experiencing racism to people who are afraid others might think them racist.
The student letter didn't ask for special treatment because black students were suffering because of experiencing racism themselves, but that they are suffering anxiety because an unrelated black person was killed by racists. In terms of practical negative impact on a person's life, people thinking you're racist will probably make things a lot harder for you than "someone who vaguely looks similar to me was murdered on the other side of the country".
Now, I'd hope people wouldn't be dumb enough to think someone is racist just because a high-profile racist incident happened in their state, and in that case, the above wouldn't make sense, but we did see a bunch of people become violentl against Asian people just because a virus was allegedly first found in a Chinese town, so it might be a very real possibility.
AHAHAHAHAHA breathes AHAHAHAHAHA!
The original email from the baizou[0] student is just typical leftist neurotic derangement. The only way to win that game is to not play.
I guess the poor old professor hasn't been exposed to the insane fragility of the typical leftist campus activist first hand. It's not the mid-2000s anymore.
[0] https://images3.memedroid.com/images/UPLOADED564/5edfb27b176...
Curiosity would have been a better response: What's going on for the student who's sending it? How about for the students of color? Really get a personal understanding without an agenda. Find out what you're missing. That attitude by itself could really settle things down.
In a school of management, he obviously mismanaged the situation, because the end result was loss of income for himself. I'm guessing that his preconceived notions prevented him from seeing the considerable power that demands for racial equity carry in organizations nowadays, even when they come from people low on the totem pole.