Well, apparently the OP was asking about frivolous lawsuits, or at least according to the ret-con he was. I guess.
You have almost zero facts; unless somebody here was involved in the case, we have to work from negligible information.
[sub]Also, have you been around a college environment lately? Anything that even vaguely affects ability to get tenure is massively detrimental to a professor’s teaching career. [/sub]
Err…a few points:
[li]Correct me if I’m wrong, but “Great Debates” does not employ anybody.[/li][li]It’s not a matter of “didn’t like”; it’s a matter of “discriminated against/harassed” (not knowing the details of the case, I won’t attempt to say which should be correct).[/li]Just because things run smoother when you break the law, doesn’t make the law wrong.
Yes, my wife is a medical school professor who had trouble getting tenure. In my opinion (and hers), she was treated unfairly, much more so than the cited case. However, the unfairness had nothing to do with sex or gender. In her department, as in most organizations, employees routinely get treated better or worse than they deserve. Of course, the degree of unfairness is a matter of opinion.
That’s why I doubt the ability of a jury to render justice in subtle cases. And it’s why I think a heavy dose of lawsuits is likely to worsen the organization, not imporve it.
december ‘much more unfairly than in the cited case’?
In the cited case, some one made accusations against the professor, the professor was disciplined for the actions, even tho’ the accusations were later shown to be false. THEN the U refused to remove the letter of reprimand.
This would be the same as the state convicting you w/o investigation on charges, later shown to be false then refusing to remove the conviction from your record. This goes past ‘unfair’. Unfair to me, would be something like preferential treatment in assignment of office space, parking space, class assignments etc.
To knowingly have false information in an employee file and refuse to delete it is waaaaaay past ‘unfair’.
Yes, she wasn’t just threatened with denial of tenure; she was denied tenure by the Dean after the Faculty committees had approved her. The reason was IMHO that she got caught up in a battle by the administration to reduce or eliminate the use of tenure. She looked briefly at suing, but chose not to, partly because a male had been similarly treated. Instead she worked out a deal under which she got promoted to a non-tenured Associate Professor and then she did finally get tenure two years later.
But, unfairness is a part of life. My firm was acquired a couple of years ago, so I wound up reporting the their chief actuary. Had we be the acquirer, he’d have reported to me.
Some employees routinely get away with more than others. Some get bigger or smaller raises than they deserve. Some siblings get better treatment from their parents. This is all unfortunate, but I think that heavy court involvement is likely to make a system less effectively and probably even more unfairly.
Good. That means you understand the importance of what’s involved. Glad we’re on the same page here.
Which is why you didn’t have a case. If it did have something to do with gender–and could show that to a jury’s satisfaction–would you still believe it unfair for her to receive compensation?
And that sucks. But when they do it based on gender, it stops “sucking”, and becomes “illegal”.
And you know this is a subtle case…how? Maybe the jury saw something that made it a bit more clear to them.
From the article:
This is the only indication that the jury was unsure, and it came from the denfence lawyer. OTOH, they deliberated for four hours, which doesn’t sound like a whole lot of struggling to me.
So, navtechie, would you (or any of the others disgusted by frivolous lawsuits), turn down your chance for an ‘unfair’ settlement?
Honestly now. If you had a chance to win thousands, or perhaps millions, of dollars would you take the high moral ground and refuse? Not me.
I wonder.
Peace,
mangeorge
Ok, being pretty new here, I have no idea what has been discussed in the past, so please bear with me if this subject has been covered before… What I’d like to see addressed in this thread, is the concept of same sex, sexual harassment. What is the general consensus, concerning unwanted homosexual advances and/or sexual remarks, within the bounds of a homosexual supervisors’ work place relation-ship when dealing with a decidedly heterosexual male working in the same dept. Do the same rules apply to this scenario as they do in the more common male/female situation. What would be the burden of proof of sexual harassment in this case?
Has anyone come up with a decent cite for this yet? Other than the FOX editorial I found nothing about this case. The woman, Sandra Banack, is a professor at CSUF, but I found nothing about her case.
that got navtechie stirred up to begin with (here) is that the lady takes one gender discrimination case, and one sexual harassment prevention training class, admits she doesn’t have a lick of data to stand on, and yet claims that ‘the sexual harassment industry’ “will keep hiking up the amount on tuition checks” to a sufficient extent that we should all get agitated about it.
By the same token, I could extrapolate from this one editorial, and a comment by a local conservative Republican candidate that the average American pays 40% of his income in taxes (compare here) into a sweeping claim that conservatives don’t give a flip about the truth.
Mind you, I don’t think that’s the case - there are conservative columnists that I read regularly, because I can frequently learn something from them - I’m just making the point that this conservative columnist doesn’t give a flip about the truth, by showing the broad claim I could make if my standards of intellectual honesty were on a par with hers.
JohnTheRed:
Same-sex sexual harassment is indeed a bit of a hijack, so I’ll be brief. The Supreme Court decided a couple years ago that same-sex sexual harassment is compensable in the same way as traditional sexual harassment. However, they stressed that to be compensable, the harassment must take place because of the victim’s gender, i.e., “I’m harassing you because you’re a guy.” Not real likely, the Court implied, but still possible. I don’t know if any such suits have been successful, but a few have been filed.
Thank you very much…Like I say, I’m not looking to hijack the thread too far off the topic of sexual harrassment…
…OK…I understand what you’re saying …But I have to ask your opinion as to why isn’t it obvious to the Supreme Court that if the male subject, who claims he’s experiencing harrassing behavior, and is trying to thwart unwanted sexual advances and or remarks from a decidely homosexual male, who is his work superior, that he (the harrassed employee) IS being harrassed due to the fact he is a male?
The case before the Court involved a bunch of heterosexual men on an oil platform, not homosexuals. They harassers weren’t looking to get laid, so your question wasn’t really before the Court.
But more importantly, appellate courts do not decide facts. That’s the job of trial courts. All the Supreme Court decides is what the law is, and they decided that the law allows suits for same-sex harassment.
Although this is not my area of expertise, I remember reading some commentary several months ago about same-sex harassment. Although I don’t recall the details, the gist was that sexual harassment is forbidden under Title VII. As such, a plaintiff must allege and show that the harassing behavior was motivated by gender - while it might be same-sex or opposite sex, it must happen because of the victim’s gender.
The commentary then went on to discuss a fire chief in (Boston?), who was being sued by several of his subordinates, male and female. Each alleged being subject to sexual harassment - both men and women had crotches grabbed, the chief bent each over and forcefully simulated sex with them, and so forth.
The question - did those plaintiffs have an action under Title VII?
Of course they do, Rick. The law doesn’t say that the defendant has to limit him/herself to one gender.
Otherwise all a perp (perv) would have to do to hide from the law would be to pester everyone.
This person obviously wanted to dominate all genders.
Has thjere been a decision?
Peace,
mangeorge
