Haynes v. Ind. Univ.

• Decision Date: 04 September 2018
• Docket Number: No. 17-2890,17-2890
• Citation: 902 F.3d 724
• Parties: Ray K. HAYNES, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. INDIANA UNIVERSITY, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

902 F.3d 724

Ray K. HAYNES, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.INDIANA UNIVERSITY, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 17-2890

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued April 11, 2018

Decided September 4, 2018

Kevin W. Betz, Sandra L. Blevins, Courtney E. Endwright, Attorneys, BETZ + BLEVINS, Indianapolis, IN, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Melissa Anne Macchia, Michael Charles Terrell, Attorneys, TAFT STETTINIUS & HOLLISTER LLP, Indianapolis, IN, for Defendants-Appellees Indiana University, Indiana University Board of Trustees, Michael A. McRobbie, Lauren K. Robel, and Eliza Pavalko.

Before Bauer, Sykes, and Barrett, Circuit Judges.

Sykes, Circuit Judge.

Ray Haynes was employed as an assistant professor in the Department of Education at Indiana University. At the end of his six-year probationary contract, he lost his bid for tenure. Haynes, who is black, alleges that the University denied his tenure application because of his race in violation of federal law. The district judge entered summary judgment for the University and we affirm. The judge’s evidentiary rulings were sound, and the record does not support an inference that the University denied tenure because of Haynes’s race.

I. Background

In 2008 Indiana University hired Haynes as an assistant professor in the Instruction Systems Technology Department of the School of Education. Roughly three-quarters of Haynes’s salary was financed by the Strategic Recruitment Fund, which the University established to "facilitate the recruitment of underrepresented minorities and women into the professoriate." Haynes was offered a six-year probationary contract, at the end of which the University would decide if he qualified for tenure.

Achieving tenure at Indiana University is a multistep process fraught with nuanced and highly contextualized value judgments. The University’s tenure guidelines provide that "[d]ecisions about tenure ... are reached through the comprehensive and rigorous peer review of achievements and promise." More specifically, a candidate is evaluated across three dimensions: research, teaching, and service. He must be "excellent" in at least one area of his choosing and "satisfactory" in the other two.

After making this selection, the candidate formally begins the tenure application process. He first assembles a dossier that includes his curriculum vitae, a personal statement, and a list of twelve proposed external reviewers. The candidate and the University together select six of these reviewers to write letters evaluating the candidate’s application. Once completed, these letters are submitted with the rest of the dossier for several levels of faculty review. First, a committee within the candidate’s department considers the application and issues a recommendation. Its findings and conclusions are then passed along to a school-wide committee, which does the same. Finally, with the candidate’s dossier and two committee reports in hand, the University’s Tenure Advisory Committee makes a recommendation to the Vice Provost, who in turn issues a tenure decision and submits it for final approval by the Provost, President, and Board of Trustees.

This case centers on Haynes’s experience with this winding tenure process. In April 2013 Haynes submitted his dossier to the School of Education, which was responsible for reaching out to his proposed external reviewers. Surprisingly, only one of Haynes’s twelve potential recommenders agreed to evaluate his application. This left Haynes to seek out alternates. Thomas Brush, the chair of his department, offered a few suggestions, and Haynes put forward a few more of his own. Together Brush and Haynes eventually secured six reviewers willing to write evaluations, three proposed by Haynes and three he adopted on Brush’s recommendation.

The letters were largely positive, albeit with a notable exception. Patricia Hardré, one of Brush’s proposed reviewers, put Haynes’s "overall research performance in a gr[ay] area of clearly satisfactory[ ] but not clearly excellent." Her main concern was that Haynes’s research was "not as rigorous in methods, nor as high-quality in venues, as most candidates" she had reviewed from peer institutions. Hardré also opined that Haynes offered nothing "new" beyond his "unique specialization of ‘inclusion’ and his identity as an African-American." She again commented on Haynes’s race later in her evaluation, this time saying she regretted that she was unable to "support and endorse a colleague who is a member of an underrepresented minority."

These critiques notwithstanding, Haynes took his completed dossier and embarked on the University’s tiered review process. Because he selected research as his performance area of excellence, he needed to demonstrate that he was "beginning to establish a national and/or international reputation as an original contributor through research." Haynes also had to prove that his teaching and service to the University community were satisfactory.

Haynes got off to a good start with his department’s tenure committee, which voted 4–2 in his favor. Brush supported the committee’s recommendation and drafted a summary of its findings to be included with Haynes’s dossier. He remarked that Haynes’s scholarship could "have a huge impact in K–12, higher education, and business and industry settings." Despite Hardré’s concerns, he also noted that several of "Haynes’[s] peer-reviewed publications [are] in well-respected journals." Finally, Brush compiled a series of student reviews that favorably commented on Haynes’s teaching performance.

Haynes’s dossier was then forwarded to Krista Glazewski who presented his case to the School of Education’s tenure committee. There Haynes did not fare as well as he might have hoped. The committee voted 6–3 against tenure, finding Haynes’s research to be less than excellent and his teaching to be unsatisfactory. Gerardo Gonzalez, the school’s dean, wrote a memorandum adopting and expressing the committee’s concerns. In it he explained that "the committee questioned the extent of Dr. Haynes’[s] impact based on low citation numbers and low numbers of publications in high-quality journals." As for teaching, the committee noted that Haynes’s "evaluations ha[d] been mixed[ ] and particularly low in the online courses." Gonzalez continued: Haynes failed to show "significant improvement over the years[,] and comments from some students indicated that Dr. Haynes sometimes [was] unresponsive to emails and questions about course assignments." In December 2013 Gonzalez advised Haynes that the School of Education would recommend against tenure.

Things only got worse for Haynes at the university-wide Tenure Advisory Committee. For many of the reasons cited by the School of Education, the committee voted unanimously against tenure in a 9–0 vote. All nine members concluded that Haynes’s research was not excellent, and eight determined that his teaching was unsatisfactory. The University’s Vice Provost adopted these conclusions and informed Haynes on March 26, 2014, that tenure was denied. All in all, 27 faculty members voted on Haynes’s application, with 18 finding his teaching unsatisfactory and 19 concluding that his research was not excellent.

Haynes vigorously contested his tenure decision. He began with several layers of academic review, then lodged a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and finally filed suit in federal court against the University and several of its administrators in their individual and official capacities. (We refer to the defendants collectively as "the University" unless the context requires otherwise.) Haynes alleged that his application for tenure was rejected because of his race in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, 42 U.S.C. § 1981, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e et seq . Haynes sought several forms of injunctive relief, including reinstatement, and monetary damages for lost pay and other injuries.

The case proceeded through discovery, and the University eventually moved for summary judgment. Several issues in this appeal involve the ensuing motions filed in the district court, which requires us to dive into a bit of procedural minutiae.

Haynes submitted a declaration from Laura Perna, his expert on academic tenure, with his response to the University’s motion. The University moved to strike the declaration, both in its reply brief and by adjoining motion, arguing that the expert’s opinion did not meet the requirements of Rule 702 of the Federal Rules of Evidence and Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. , 509 U.S. 579, 113 S.Ct. 2786, 125 L.Ed.2d 469 (1993).

Haynes asked for leave to file a surreply on the admissibility of his expert’s declaration. He also sought to submit a lengthier report from Perna and an additional expert report from Anthony Greenwald on the subject of implicit bias. Haynes argued that these additional materials were relevant to the Daubert determination. He filed a separate motion for leave to supplement the record with these reports because he was presenting them after summary-judgment briefing had concluded. He said the reports were late because Perna and Greenwald couldn’t prepare them in time to comply with the court’s briefing schedule.

The judge excluded Perna’s expert declaration and declined to accept the additional expert reports. Applying Rule 702 and Daubert , the judge concluded that the opinions in Perna’s declaration were inadmissible because she did not rely on any specialized knowledge and her testimony would not assist the trier of fact. As for the late expert reports, the judge rejected the explanation for their tardiness because Haynes had never before suggested that the court’s briefing schedule for dispositive motions might interfere with the preparation of any expert reports. In fact, he had sought and obtained several extensions of time without raising this concern.

With these evidentiary disputes out of the way, the judge...