Bickerstaff v. College
| Decision Date | 01 August 1998 |
| Docket Number | Docket No. 98-7702 |
| Citation | 196 F.3d 435 |
| Parties | (2nd Cir. 1999) JOYCE BICKERSTAFF, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. VASSAR COLLEGE, Defendant-Appellee |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Second Circuit |
Appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York (Charles L. Brieant, Judge) dismissing the complaint.
Affirmed.
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[Copyrighted Material Omitted] ELEANOR JACKSON PIEL, New York, New York, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
JAMES P. DROHAN, Fishkill, New York (Natalie Marshall, Donoghue, Thomas, Auslander & Drohan, Fishkill, New York, on the brief), for Defendant-Appellee.
Before: KEARSE and SACK, Circuit Judges, and McAVOY, Chief District Judge.*
Plaintiff Joyce Bickerstaff appeals from a final judgment of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Charles L. Brieant, Judge, dismissing her complaint alleging that defendant Vassar College ("Vassar") denied her request for promotion to full professor because of her race and sex, in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ("Title VII"), 42 U.S.C. 2000e et seq. (1994). The district court granted summary judgment dismissing the complaint on the ground that Vassar had presented a sufficiently supported nondiscriminatory reason for denying Bickerstaff promotion and Bickerstaff had not produced evidence that the reason advanced was pretextual. On appeal, Bickerstaff contends that summary judgment was improper because the district court overlooked and misconstrued a vast array of evidence establishing genuine issues of material fact as to whether Vassar's decision to deny her promotion to full professor was race and sex-based. Finding no basis for reversal, we affirm.
The facts of this case, taken in the light most favorable to Bickerstaff as the party against whom summary judgment was granted, are as follows.
Vassar is a private educational institution, chartered in 1863, and located in Poughkeepsie, New York. Dr. Bickerstaff, an African-American female, was hired by Vassar as a lecturer with a joint appointment in the Africana Studies Program and the Education Department in 1971.1 Her joint appointment was originally allocated two-thirds to the Department of Education and one-third to the Africana Studies Program. That allocation was later reversed. Upon earning a Ph.D. in 1975, Bickerstaff received the rank of Assistant Professor at Vassar. In 1978, Vassar promoted Bickerstaff to the rank of Associate Professor and granted her tenure.
In 1989, Bickerstaff sought promotion to full professor, which Vassar denied. Bickerstaff appealed to Vassar's Appeal Committee ("VAC"), which rejected her challenge. No litigation ensued. Between 1989 and 1994, Bickerstaff published no scholarly articles. Bickerstaff spent the entire 1990-91 and 1991-92 academic years on leave as a visiting professor at Berea College.
In 1994, Bickerstaff again sought promotion to full professor, which Vassar denied. The present litigation ensued concerning the denial in 1994 only. We thus review Vassar's procedures for promotion and the events surrounding Bickerstaff's application in 1994 for full professor.
To achieve promotion to full professor, the Vassar Faculty Handbook requires a candidate to meet the following posted criteria:
Continued demonstration of sound scholarship or significant artistic activity and teaching of a high quality will be required. It is necessary that marked distinction will have been reached in scholarship or teaching, preferably in both.
An additional important consideration will be academic leadership, which may be evidenced by participation in professional activities outside the College, service on committees within the College, or contributions to educational innovation or policy making at both the departmental and college levels.
Vassar's procedures for promotion are established in its bylaws and are set forth in the Faculty Handbook. For a candidate such as Bickerstaff with a joint appointment, the review is a diffusive process that involves several steps and multiple recommenders. First, "two members of rank higher than that of the member under consideration each from the home department (e.g., the chair and one other) and from the multidisciplinary program . . . meet to evaluate the professional qualifications of the candidate." Second, members of the program and the department confer and "make a written report of their deliberations," which is transmitted to the program, the department, the college-wide Faculty Appointments and Salary Committee ("FASC"), the Dean of the Faculty, and the President. Third, "the program and the department . . . take this report into consideration in making their own separate recommendations to FASC, the Dean and the President." Fourth, FASC and the Dean, upon consideration of the departmental and program recommendations, the teaching evaluation of the Student Advisory Committee ("SAC"), the committee reports of the department and the program, and the reports of the outside evaluators,2 make separate recommendations to the President. Lastly, the President submits her final recommendation to the Board of Trustees.
In instances "[w]hen the department or the program has fewer than two members of rank higher then [sic] that of the person under consideration, an ad hoc committee [is] formed in each case." These procedures "are designed to accommodate recommendations from both [the] department and program." An appeal is available to VAC, comprised exclusively of members of the Vassar faculty.
At issue is Bickerstaff's review for promotion to full professor over the 1994-95 academic year.
On November 14, 1994, SAC, which is charged with reviewing student Course Evaluation Questionnaires ("CEQs")3 and issuing its analysis and recommendation on promotional applications, issued a 5-0 (with one abstention) recommendation against promotion for Bickerstaff. SAC stated that it was alarmed by Bickerstaff's recently "remarkably low" CEQs and that "[t]he only identified trend is a steady decline in evaluations." SAC added that it "is so concerned at [Bickerstaff's] performance that it feels her present status as an associate Professor deserves reexamination by the College."
On November 28, 1994, a group consisting of the ad hoc Education Committee ("Education Committee") and the ad hoc Africana Studies Committee ("AS Committee") met to discuss Bickerstaff's qualifications for promotion. Vassar asserts that, in accordance with its bylaws, it convened the two ad hoc committees to review Bickerstaff for promotion because the Africana Studies Program and the Education Department each had fewer than two members of rank higher than hers. The meeting between the two committees was memorialized in a written report dated November 30, 1994, which generally discussed her candidacy, without reaching any firm conclusions, under the criteria of scholarship, teaching, and service.
On December 2, 1994, the three-member AS Committee unanimously recommended Bickerstaff for promotion to full professor. As past committees had done when reviewing other faculty for promotion, the AS Committee examined Bickerstaff's scholarship and teaching under a "broader" lens that it deemed more reflective of her real contributions, which included "nontraditional scholarship" and her role outside the classroom as an "educator." The AS Committee stated, in pertinent part, that:
[Bickerstaff] more than any other faculty member in the Africana Studies Program provided the constant vision and guidance, regardless of whether she was the program director. The toll on her time and energy in establishing a new area of study at [Vassar] is another reason for viewing her scholarly contributions in a different light.
In terms of Bickerstaff's classroom teaching, however, the AS Committee did find "problems" as reflected in her CEQs. Thus, it urged her to "refocus and reinvigorate her efforts in the classroom." In the end, the AS Committee concluded that Bickerstaff had made "distinctive contributions to scholarship" and that she had "a constant and consistent educational vision through all of her work as educator, scholar, and consultant."
On December 5, 1994, the three-member Education Committee issued its report. In assessing her scholarship, it too viewed Bickerstaff's work in a "broader" context, and remarked positively on a number of Bickerstaff's specific achievements. But as to teaching, the Education Committee stated that Bickerstaff's CEQs placed her "considerably lower than what would be expected of a faculty member at Vassar in order to receive a marked distinction in teaching." In unanimously recommending against promotion, the Education Committee concluded that Bickerstaff's scholarly activities, while "creditable," did not exhibit "marked distinction" and that her teaching fell short of "marked distinction by a rather wide margin."
The three outside evaluators asked to assess Bickerstaff's scholarship and service (they were not asked to assess her teaching) unanimously recommended her for promotion to full professor. The outside evaluators commended Bickerstaff's commitment to the Africana Studies Program at Vassar and, more generally, recognized her as a national leader in her field. Representative comments included that Bickerstaff has "an extraordinary record of curriculum development, program innovation, and administration leadership'" that she "has excelled in . . . many areas while taking her turn as Chair of the Education Department, as Director of the Program in Africana Studies,...
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