Friday, January 17, 2025

More on the Franke case

Steven Lubet, an emeritus law professor at Northwestern, has a piece at CHE with the unfortunate title, "No, Katherine Franke was not fired," which presumably was not his doing.  It's an unfortuante title since, as Professor Lubet fully acknowledges, "There is no way to know the details of Franke’s negotiation with the Columbia administration, which resulted in what is technically an accelerated retirement, although obviously under stressful conditions."  That description is fully compatible with what happened constituting a constructive termination from a tenured position.

What Professor Lubet does argue is that there were good grounds for finding that Professor Franke violated the anti-discrimination policy (the issue I described as "arguable"): 

Here is the actual quotation that formed the basis for the finding against her: “So many of those Israeli students who come to the Columbia campus are coming right out of their military service and have been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus.”

 

Following at least a dozen complaints to Columbia’s Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action, outside investigators from the Sher Tremonte law firm — who had been retained by the university, as Franke had requested — found that this comment lacked a factual basis and constituted a negative, unfounded stereotype about Israeli students, who comprise a protected class under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Columbia’s policies. Based on multiple interviews, the investigators also found that Franke’s comment had an adverse impact on Israeli students, causing them to experience isolation and distress and contributing to a hostile learning environment....

 

The investigators found that Franke’s claims about harassment by Israelis at Columbia were not substantiated. They asked her to provide them with names or details of such instances, but she failed to do so.

Framed this way, this incident calls to mind Amy Wax's disparagement of the competence of African-American students at Penn, for which the sanction was removal from a required 1L course she taught.  Here we have disparagement not of the competence of Israeli students who had served in the military, but of whether it is safe to have them on campus.  It's hard to say which is worse, but both are comments a faculty member should not make about a segment of their student populations.

Even if one finds that persuasive, it still does not settle the issue how this investigation and its finding led to a "constructive" termination (as Professor Franke claims) or, in any case, her retirement without full emerita status.  There were obviously conversations going on between Columbia and Professor Franke's legal counsel we know nothing about.  It hardly strains credulity to imagine that there was animus towards Professor Franke given her outspokenness on Israel/Palestine, and that this played a role in the administration's approach to her case.  And there are still Professor Franke's allegations about gross harassment that she was subjected to by colleagues, whose truth or falsity we know nothing about.  (Oddly, Professor Lubet says nothing about the latter.)  There is, in short, still need for a University Senate investigation, since we do not know whether she was constructively terminated, threatened with further investigations or sanctions, or driven out by faculty and student harassment.  The whole affair will remain a serious stain on Columbia's reputation until more information comes to light.

 

https://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2025/01/more-on-the-franke-case.html

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