-Submitted by David Drumm (Nal), Guest Blogger
We have previously discussed the events at Widener Law School regarding Professor Lawrence Connell and Dean Linda Ammons, here, here, and here. The university formed a committee to hear the allegations of racial harassment, sexual discrimination, and retaliation. The committee, in its report, found no clear and convincing evidence of a university code violation on the racial harassment or sexual discrimination allegations.
The committee did find clear and convincing evidence pertaining to retaliation. Thomas Neuberger, Connell’s attorney, characterizes Connell’s actions not as retaliatory but as a defense against against false charges.
Ammons recommended, and the university accepted and required, that Connell submit to a psychological evaluation and anger management counseling. Connell has been suspended for a year without pay. These actions will look retaliatory if Connell’s lawsuit ever makes it to a jury.
Connell is suing Ammons, the university, and the two students who made the accusations, alleging defamation. The lawsuit seeks $1.8 in lost wages and benefits that would have accrued in the 12 years he had planned to continue working. Connell also is seeking additional damages for harm to his reputation, humiliation, pain, suffering, and emotional distress.
Widener Law is a fourth-tier law school and this situation will do little to move it up. However, this incident could affect the reputation of Widener University. Where were the Board of Trustees while all this was going down?
H/T: Legal Insurrection, VC, The Inquirer.
Va. Tech Gunman’s Records Reveal Disorganized Mental Health System
By Brigid Schulte and Tom Jackman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, August 20, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/19/AR2009081902380.html
The records indicate that Cho sought help at the university’s Cook Counseling Center three times in November and December 2005, twice on the phone and once in person. Each time, he was assessed but not treated.
AY:
You’re right on track as always.
Anonymously Yours 1, August 14, 2011 at 6:36 pm
AN,
Not to say anything to offend the princess from NY….But not all people that get psychological evaluation or admit themselves to a mental health should be precluded from purchasing a firearm…In a number of states people are admitted to the Pysch units…for purposes of detoxing…then you have the issue of HIPPA….
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AY,
I didn’t mean to imply otherwise — I agree with all of the above, with the exception of the “princess” part, perhaps… 🙂 I have a professional interest in this area — I’ve worked as a psych nurse and done mental health evaluations…
While generally speaking, I’ll agree that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, surely you aren’t saying that Connell poses a risk similar to that of Cho? (The requirement of a mental health evaluation in Connell’s case smacks of retaliation — it seems like a punitive measure, as Mike S. also noted. In the case of Cho, he had had mental health evaluations… and to what end?)
Cho’s particular motivations aside, short of locking someone up and throwing away the key, if someone wants to commit a violent act, that person will probably find a way… If Dean Ammons had been on alert at Virginia Tech and there had been a mental health evaluation, I venture to say that the tragedy at Virginia Tech might only have been delayed and/or occurred elsewhere.
mespo,
I am not suggesting that every request for a mental health evaluation is the result of someone “going Soviet” but, in this case, one must, at the very least, consider Ammons’ motivation for making the request. She’s not exactly a neutral party.
AN,
Not to say anything to offend the princess from NY….But not all people that get psychological evaluation or admit themselves to a mental health should be precluded from purchasing a firearm…In a number of states people are admitted to the Pysch units…for purposes of detoxing…then you have the issue of HIPPA….
I think the point mespo was trying to make was precaution…an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure…I read what he posted and then reread it again…In the case that he is speaking about…the person wanted to be known for something…and he is…
If I am incorrect please advise me, mespo….
“One wonders what might have happened at Virginia Tech if Dean Ammons had been stationed six hours south and had “Gone Soviet” on Seung-Hui Cho by requiring a psychlogical evaluation of him after his numerous incidents of aberrant behavior beginning in his junior year of college. I know 57 families who wish that she had.” -mespo727272
mespo,
Please don’t misunderstand — I have no problem whatsoever with the appropriate use of psychological evaluations, but they aren’t a panacea…
http://psychcentral.com/news/2007/04/18/virginia-tech-killer-committed-for-psychiatric-evaluation-in-2005/763.html
“Despite encounters with the law and his past psychiatric treatment, Cho was able to legally purchase the two handguns he used in the attack.”
The Virginia Tech situation is much different.
Anon nurse:
Charlotte Allen may not be the best advocate for Professor Connell but she is certainly the most likely. She is the author of “The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus” and a contributing editor to the Minding the Campus website of the Manhattan Institute.
Some her favorite quotes are: ‘I can’t stand atheists — but it’s not because they don’t believe in God. It’s because they’re crashing bores.”
“Allen seems to enjoy ruffling feathers, particularly when it comes to writing about women. In April 2005, she wrote in support of Harvard University President Lawrence Summers, who was in trouble after saying that innate differences between the sexes cause the lack of female presence in the sciences.”
Seems Connell and Allen have more in common that a personal interets iin Connell’s fate.
Here’s her quite apoplectic conclusion comparing the Dean’s condition for reinstatement to consignmet to a famous villain from the movies:
” As for the lawsuit, Connell never waived his right to seek redress in court against individuals whose false accusations have already cost him quite a bit of money and promise to cost much more. But that is the way of New Law School. It is perhaps only Old Law School, with its emphasis on fairness, reasonableness, and color-and gender-blind justice, that would find something totalitarian in Widener’s treatment of Connell and accordingly demand Linda Ammons’ resignation. In New Law School thinking, where power is everything, and the claims of grievance-bearing identity groups will always prevail over fairness, it is perfectly fine to strip your perceived opponent of his livelihood and to consign him to the ministrations of your own Nurse Ratched—and there is no such thing as abuse of power.”
One wonders what might have happened at Virginia Tech if Dean Ammons had been stationed six hours south and had “Gone Soviet” on Seung-Hui Cho by requiring a psychlogical evaluation of him after his numerous incidents of aberrant behavior beginning in his junior year of college. I know 57 families who wish that she had.
This professor is an idiot and possibly a bigot, but he does have rights that seem to have been forgotten by the administration. As much as I would like to see someone with his beliefs on the street instead of training young minds, it appears that the Dean is the one who needs counseling.
The earlier comments that they should have tried to fire him make more sense, but I am not sure they would have been successful.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/08/the_mess_at_widener_law_school.html
August 12, 2011
The Mess at Widener Law School
By Charlotte Allen
Abuse of Power
Excerpt:
Ammons and Kelly offered to drop the charges if Connell would consent to the psychiatric evaluation that has been a leitmotif of Ammons’ handling of Connell’s case, with its implications that Connell was at worst suffering from a mental disorder and at best in need of re-education. Connell, who had spent 15 years working in his spare time to win a new trial for a black Delaware man sentenced to death after a prosecutor had excluded blacks from the jury, was incensed at the allegations of racism. He refused the offer and hired a lawyer. In March a committee of three tenured law professors at Widener completely exonerated Connell from all the charges, clearly giving little credence to the students’ garbled allegations. Ammons promptly had the students refile, so that the case against him would be heard by Kelly and another Widener administrator, plus a professor hand-picked by Ammons. The list of charges against Connell shifted its contours: The 1996 incident disappeared, and some of the things that the two complaining students had said about Connell vanished as well.
By this time, however, Connell had amassed affidavits from students in the class in question and e-mails from other students, many of them female, attesting to his effectiveness as a teacher and his fair treatment of members of minority groups in his classes. He also presented an affidavit from Orin Kerr, a criminal-law professor at George Washington University whose credentials included having graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and having clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kerr not only defended Connell’s raising of racial issues in his classroom discussion of the Goetz case but deemed his hypothetical attempts to murder Ammons for the amusement of his students as unexceptionable pedagogy.
(“Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was repeatedly murdered in classroom hypotheticals when she was dean of Harvard Law School.”) (end of excerpt)
Gene H. 1, August 14, 2011 at 12:11 am
anon nurse,
There is plenty of jerkiness and obnoxiousness to go around in this case.
Gene H.,
So it would seem, but is Connell a racist? I have my doubts…
Blouise,
With the bad press and the potential exposure this case creates, I’d be really surprised if the Trustees aren’t already looking for a way to ditch Ammons ASAP.
anon nurse,
There is plenty of jerkiness and obnoxiousness to go around in this case.
I doubt anyone will emerge from this situation a winner. As long as the Dean has the support of the President she’s got a job. Should that support evaporate or should the Trustees start to question the President’s judgement in supporting her actions … well, we just might see her back here at Cleveland State.
I wrote: “While I completely agree that Connell is a jerk, and an obnoxious, racist one at that…”
Sometimes there are things that one wishes one hadn’t said…
perhaps he could sent a resume to the Tuskegee institute.
AY:
I agree
mespo,
I thought that this was the perfect tribute to this thread:
The opening credits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i04_J1rz5-I
The ending credits:
“However he’ll receive no freedom from my strongly held belief we have a jerk on our hands and his employment fate is more than appropriate. He wouldn’t want me on that jury deciding, by a preponderance of evidence, if truth is an absolute defense to his claims.” -mespo727272
While I completely agree that Connell is a jerk, and an obnoxious, racist one at that, this is an employment dispute that is best settled by arbitration, at this point, IMO…, but I’m not a lawyer… Having said this, I agree with Mike S. and others who have said that firing him might have been the best option.
“The Soviet system? Just because you have to pick from a list of 4? -mespo
What I actually said was this: “The deck has been stacked — he has to choose “from a list of four individuals provided to him by the University”, and the other terms are not ones to which anyone in his or her right mind would willingly submit, IMO. And then I included the other terms…
Psychiatry isn’t an exact “science”… Evaluations are quite subjective, in fact, especially when done “on the fly” and by those with a vested interest in a certain outcome.
Mike S. wrote, “I don’t like the University’s making a psychiatric evaluation part of his contrition because it smacks of punishment and as a mental health professional I don’t trust one meeting judgments of a person’s mental state. To fully evaluate anybody’s psychiatric condition takes time and I suspect quickie judgments.”
I concur.
OS:
While nationalistic sentiments draw me to Jefferson it’s hard to imagine a wiser man than Voltaire. Maybe Oscar Wilde or Balzac can lay claim to equal wit, but in the speaking truth to power department he has no equals.
MIke S:
“Had they been more lurid in detail it would be possible to infer vitriol on their part. However, they were moderate, though certainly indicating his state of mind.”
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Good point Mike. A vitrolic accusation allows the decider to infer a lesser state of culpability by the accused, while a moderate one permits the decider to infer a higher state. Most folks don’t realize this which adds to the students’ credibility. The professors case suffers for just the same reason but in reverse.