On Thursday, The College Fix posted an article about a court case involving an accounting lecturer at UCLA.
The article reports:
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford III recently ruled against entirely dismissing a lawsuit filed against UCLA by accounting lecturer Gordon Klein, who would not implement a lenient race-based grading system in the immediate aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
The judge, in his March 30 ruling, did allow some causes of action lodged against the University of California system regents and UCLA Dean Antonio Bernardo to be dismissed, but allowed several others to proceed. A jury trial has been scheduled for April 2023.
Ford stated in his ruling that Klein has provided evidence that “would support judgment in his favor” regarding his breach of contract, false light and labor code violation claims.
Cornell law Professor William Jacobson, in explaining the ruling, noted UCLA had sought dismissal of the case under California’s anti-SLAPP protections, “which provides an expedited process for adjudication of whether the claims fall under the statute.”
Jacobson said the ruling means UCLA’s avenues for avoiding a jury trial are small.
“While I don’t think that precludes later motions practice, there already has been a review of evidence by the court and the court found that the claims are legally cognizable. So it’s unclear to me what the path would be to get the remaining parts of the case dismissed prior to trial,” he wrote on his Legal Insurrection blog.
Following Floyd’s death, Klein received a request from a non-black student asking that he provide academic leniency for black students under emotional duress at the time.
Klein responded June 2, 2020, by asking how he was supposed to identify black students in the online class; whether he should also go easy on white students from Minneapolis; how much leeway to show half-black students; and how the student feels about Martin Luther King Jr.’s admonition to not evaluate people based on “the color of their skin.”
The article concludes:
Klein declined to comment to The College Fix this week on the ruling. Bernardo referred a request for comment to UCLA’s media affairs division.
“The rulings last week in no way addressed the question of punitive damages. The court dismissed some of Professor Klein’s causes of action, and made no final rulings on the merits of any of the remaining claims against the university or Dean Bernardo,” UCLA spokesman Bill Kisliuk told The College Fix.
Last fall, Klein wrote an op-ed explaining the motivation for his lawsuit and why he seeks both compensatory and punitive damages.
“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,” he wrote.
This is another example of the insanity that has gripped our college campuses. Giving a student a grade he has not earned does not help anyone. The goal of an education is to prepare a student to be a contributing member of society. To pad a grade for any reason undermines that goal. I choose not to name names, but in recent years we have seen the folly of putting people in positions based on their race, sexuality, gender preference, etc. The request by the student for academic leniency was simply the predecessor to promotions based on something other than merit.