Dartmouth Promises to Collaborate With Plaintiffs in Settling Sexual Misconduct Suit
The class action lawsuit, filed last November in U.S. District Court in New Hampshire, accused three male psychology professors of rape, sexual assault and harassment.
August 07, 2019 at 05:52 PM
4 minute read
Dartmouth College’s $14 million settlement with nine female students offers general counsel an important lesson on negotiation: Sometimes collaboration can achieve what money alone might not.
Details of the settlement, which still needs court approval, are due by Aug. 20 and will be made public then. But both parties indicated the negotiations went beyond money to include provisions that the school and plaintiffs work together to help solve systemic problems.
The class action lawsuit, filed last November in U.S. District Court in New Hampshire, accused three male psychology professors of rape, sexual assault and harassment.
It claimed the professors used their power over their students’ academic careers and their future employment to suppress complaints. The parties entered mediation July 24 and announced the settlement in principle Aug. 6.
Dartmouth general counsel Sandhya Iyer took part in the negotiations, but both she and Dartmouth did not respond to a request for an interview with her.
In a joint announcement, the plaintiffs and the school spoke of forming a “historic partnership.” Dartmouth President Philip Hanlon talked of “the unique opportunity for us to work closely with the plaintiffs,” and of “taking on a challenging societal issue in a collaboration.”
Justin Anderson, Dartmouth vice president for communications, told Corporate Counsel on Wednesday the school agreed that the settlement will include specific actions that it will fund to identify and rectify current problems and prevent future issues.
Those actions include an expansion of the provost’s diversity fund; mechanisms for the plaintiffs to interact with an external advisory committee; structures to solicit input and feedback from the broadest cross-section of the community; and a commitment to expanding Dartmouth’s partnership with WISE, a regional organization to end gender-based violence.
Anderson said the school also launched a Campus Climate and Culture Initiative in January, and one of its first actions was to require that all graduate programs establish research advisory committees rather than rely on a single research adviser overseeing a student’s work. “This will ensure that a graduate student will never again be subject to the potentially problematic power imbalance of a single adviser,” he explained.
Deborah Marcuse and the law firm of Sanford Heisler Sharp represented the women. Marcuse declined to comment Wednesday and pointed to plaintiffs’ statements in the announcement.
In the statement, the plaintiffs said, “We are satisfied to have reached an agreement with Dartmouth College, and are encouraged by our humble contribution to bringing restorative justice to a body of Dartmouth students beyond the named plaintiffs … Together with Dartmouth, we plan to continue addressing the systemic roots of power-based personal violence and gender-based discrimination across all levels of severity so that our experiences—and those of the class we represent—are never repeated.”
Steven Kelly, head of Sanford Heisler’s national criminal/sexual violence practice, said in the statement, “In more than 30 years fighting for victims, I have never seen a case in which so many brave victims united to engage in such a real dialogue with an educational institution to enact meaningful reforms to protect students … Dartmouth will be a better institution due to the efforts, vision and moral courage of the nine named plaintiffs.”
Although he did not admit liability, Dartmouth’s Hanlon also praised the women, saying they “courageously came forward alongside other students to bring to my administration’s attention a toxic environment created by three former tenured professors, who will never set foot on this campus again. I cannot express strongly enough my deep disappointment that these individuals violated their positions of trust.”
Read More:
4 Lessons on Handling a Sexual Abuse Scandal for Embattled USC
What’s the GC’s Role in Fighting Faculty-Student Sex Harassment in Higher Ed
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