Dive Brief:
- A White former associate director in Rochester Institute of Technology’s student affairs department raised jury questions over whether RIT passed her over for a promotion to director in favor of a Black candidate from outside the university because of his race, a federal district court in New York held Sept. 4.
- Per the ruling in Ecock-Rotondo v. Rochester Institute of Technology, the student affairs vice president who selected the Black candidate, said she did so because he had “the most positive, forward-looking vision” and experience in a director role, as well as with budgets and supervising. The plaintiff, who’d been an RIT associate director for nearly a decade, resigned and sued on a number of grounds, including race discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
- The ruling follows other recent holdings finding potential merit in reverse bias claims. In this case, the court said summary judgment wasn’t proper because the parties disputed how the hiring process was conducted and whether RIT’s stated reasons for not hiring the plaintiff were a pretext for discrimination, raising factual questions for a jury.
Dive Insight:
Standing alone, employer policies promoting diverse hiring don’t equate to unlawful selection criteria, the court said.
However, the associate director made several assertions that, if a jury found her credible, could show RIT violated Title VII when it rejected her for the director role because of race-based criteria, the court noted.
For example, she argued that RIT didn’t follow its typical procedures when the employee who conducted the initial candidate screenings used a new ranking chart that included “diversity metrics,” the court said. She also asserted that he wrongly shared this information with the vice president who made the hiring decision. But RIT countered that he gave the VP his notes because she was part of the search committee, and it didn’t have strict policies forbidding the sharing of such information.
Additionally, the associate director pointed to the VP’s alleged comment that she wasn’t “going to bring just two white women to campus” for interviews “and not bring this black man.” The court said a jury would have to decide whether this was merely a stray remark, as RIT asserted, or evidence that the VP factored race into her decision.
To the extent the associate director challenged the Black candidate’s qualifications, hers weren’t “so superior” as to require summary judgment, the court explained. Also, the Black candidate met many of the minimum qualifications, including having a master’s degree in higher education, two years’ experience in a director-level role, and experience running a college residential complex, which involved student conduct responsibilities like those required by the RIT position, the court pointed out.
More than a year and a half into the second Trump administration, higher education leaders are still looking for a blueprint to provide diverse and welcoming environments without getting caught up in federal investigations, legal experts say.
As for S&P 500 companies, those who stuck with their DEI commitments outperformed companies that rolled them back, according to recent research out of the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University.