Moskowitz v. Trustees of Purdue University

• Decision Date: 22 September 1993
• Docket Number: No. 93-1349,93-1349
• Citation: 5 F.3d 279
• Parties: 62 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 42,553, 62 USLW 2207, 85 Ed. Law Rep. 1004 Merwin MOSKOWITZ, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. TRUSTEES OF PURDUE UNIVERSITY and Purdue University, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 279

5 F.3d 279

62 Empl. Prac. Dec. P 42,553, 62 USLW 2207,

85 Ed. Law Rep. 1004

Merwin MOSKOWITZ, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. TRUSTEES OF PURDUE UNIVERSITY and Purdue University,

Defendants-Appellees.

No. 93-1349.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued Aug. 3, 1993.

Decided Sept. 22, 1993.

Raymond C. Fay (argued) Hillary L. Pettegrew, Bell, Boyd & Lloyd, Washington, DC, Cheryl M. Knodle, Michael J. Stapleton, Ball, Eggleston, Bumbleburg & McBride, Lafayette, IN, for plaintiff-appellant.

John C. Duffey, Deborah B. Noah, Stuart & Branigin, Lafayette, IN, for defendants-appellees.

Before BAUER, Chief Judge, and POSNER and MANION, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

The plaintiff, Merwin Moskowitz, a tenured professor of biology at Purdue University, was forced to retire in 1991 upon reaching the age of seventy, the age at which the Age Discrimination in Employment Act permits mandatory retirement of professors. He nevertheless filed this suit under the Act, charging that the university had discriminated unlawfully against him on account of his age by denying him research funds and facilities and travel grants before his retirement. These resources, he argues, would have given him post-retirement income and it is that lost post-retirement income that he seeks to recover by this suit. The district judge granted summary judgment for the defendants. The appeal raises important questions concerning the nature of a continuing violation of the age discrimination law and the remedial scope of that law.

Construed as favorably to the plaintiff as reason permits, the record reveals that in 1988, three years before he retired, a dispute arose over the allocation of laboratory space in the biology department at Purdue. Moskowitz agreed to give up a part of his space--all but Room G-127--but returned from his summer vacation to discover that the room was in disarray and unusable as a laboratory. Repeated requests brought the following response from Moskowitz's department head in June 1989: "Don't you think you should retire"? The following month Moskowitz was formally evicted from Room G-127. In the fall, after he complained to the dean of sciences that he was being discriminated against, his department head offered to allow Moskowitz to share Room G-127 with its new occupant, and allocated $3,000 in research funds to him. The room was too small, however, for two people to conduct research in it. After Moskowitz complained to a vice president of the university, Moskowitz's department head told Moskowitz that he should arrange to conduct his research off campus and that he could have another $3,000 in research funds for the coming academic year, his last before his mandatory retirement. He protested that $3,000 was too little, considering that he would have to be doing his research off campus; and in July 1990 his department head promised him an additional $2,000. He decided to use the $8,000 in grants ($3,000 + $2,000 + $3,000--having had no laboratory space, he had not yet spent any of the $3,000 allotted for the just completed academic year) to finance a trip to France to do research there. But in January 1991, as he was about to set off, he discovered that some of the earlier grant of $3,000 had lapsed and could no longer be spent. As a result, he didn't have enough money for the trip, which he therefore had to cancel. In May 1991, the month before his mandatory retirement, he filed a charge of employment discrimination with the EEOC, complaining that he had been denied laboratory space and travel and research funds because of his age and that as a result his opportunity to obtain post-retirement government research grants had been impaired.

Moskowitz filed the administrative charge more than 180 days (the applicable statute of limitations, 29 U.S.C. Sec. 626(d)(1)) after the university made clear to him in January 1990 through his department head that it would not give him suitable laboratory space. The alleged discrimination in the allocation of laboratory space was complete that month, Delaware State College v. Ricks, 449 U.S. 250, 101 S.Ct. 498, 66 L.Ed.2d 431 (1980); Davidson v. Board of Governors, 920 F.2d 441, 443-44 (7th Cir.1990), and since Moskowitz also believed that it was a discriminatory act, the statute of limitations began to run then. Cada v. Baxter Healthcare Corp., 920 F.2d 446, 450, 453 (7th Cir.1991). It is true that at the same time that Moskowitz's department head made clear that the university would not give him suitable laboratory space, the department head offered him an additional $3,000 in research funds which he could use for laboratory research off campus. Could the offer have been an effort to lull Moskowitz into thinking that he hadn't been discriminated against after all? If so, it failed. Moskowitz regarded the amount as inadequate--and even if adequate for the coming year it could hardly have been thought to compensate him for the deprivation of usable laboratory space for an entire year.

He appeals to the concept of a continuing violation. This is a rather vague concept and its utility is questionable when there is a statute of limitations administered in accordance with the doctrine of equitable tolling, as the statutes of limitations applicable to the age discrimination law are. Cada v. Baxter Healthcare Corp., supra, 920 F.2d at 451. Under the doctrine of equitable tolling, as we explained in Cada, a person injured by an unlawful act need not sue until he knows, or through the exercise of reasonable diligence would have known, not only that he has been injured (for once he discovers that, his cause of action has accrued and the statute of limitations begins to run) but also that he has been injured by a possibly wrongful act of the defendant. (The issue in this case of course is not the defendants' identity but whether the possibly wrongful character of their acts was knowable.) If it is only with the benefit of hindsight, after a series of discriminatory acts, that the plaintiff can realize that he is indeed a victim of unlawful discrimination, he can sue in regard to all of the acts provided he sues promptly after learning their character, even if the statute of limitations has run on all of them. If, however, he knows or with the exercise of reasonable diligence would have known after each act that it was discriminatory and had harmed him, he may not sit back and accumulate all the discriminatory acts and sue on all within the statutory period applicable to the last one. So the fact that a series of discriminatory or otherwise unlawful acts is indeed a series, a continuum, rather than a concatenation of unrelated acts, will delay the deadline for suing with respect to the earliest acts in the series only if their character was not apparent when they were committed but became so when viewed in the light of the later acts.

Only in such a case is it proper to describe the acts as adding up to a "continuing violation" that allows the plaintiff to defer suing until the end of the statutory period (the 180 days, or whatever the period of limitations set by the statute is--and it could be extended by equitable tolling or other tolling doctrines) applicable to the last act. Malhotra v. Cotter & Co., 885 F.2d 1305, 1310 (7th Cir.1989); Sabree v. United Brotherhood of Carpenters & Joiners, 921 F.2d 396, 402 (1st Cir.1990); Cajigas v. Banco de Ponce, 741 F.2d 464, 470 (1st Cir.1984) (per curiam); Glass v. Petro-Tex Chemical Corp., 757 F.2d 1554, 1561 (5th Cir.1985). Even in such a case, there is no need for a separate doctrine of continuing violation (multiplication of concepts is the bane of American law), since the result follows directly from the doctrine of equitable tolling. The overlap between the doctrines is noted in Selan v. Kiley, 969 F.2d 560, 565 (7th Cir.1992).

None of this can help Moskowitz, who by January 1990 knew that he had lost one year's laboratory use and would lose another, tempered only by an inadequate grant, and believed that it was because of his age. He had no excuse for waiting more than 180 days after that before filing a charge in which he complained about the denial of laboratory space. Id. at 567; Roberts v. Gadsden Memorial Hospital, 850 F.2d 1549 (11th Cir.1988) (per curiam).

That does not dispose of the appeal, however. In January 1991 Moskowitz discovered that he had been short-changed on his research grant. He attributes this cheat to his age, and claims that by preventing him from conducting his planned research in France it has made it harder for him to obtain government research grants during his retirement. There is no doubt that these allegations, in addition to being filed in a timely manner (for remember that he filed his administrative charge in May 1991), identify a potential injury from age discrimination. People often continue working in one way or another after retiring from their main job. Certainly on the basis of the scanty record compiled to date, we have no basis for doubting that Moskowitz might be able to obtain government research grants even though he is retired and, since serious cancer research (Moskowitz is a cancer researcher) is not conducted in home laboratories, would have to make arrangements with some other university or research entity in order to be able to conduct research. And Moskowitz's planned research sojourn in France might for all we know have significantly increased his chance of success in the highly competitive world of grants for scientific research. Obviously the chain of causation that he seeks to build between the university's reneging on a mere portion of a $3,000 research grant and his loss of post-retirement income is tenuous and speculative (and for the further reason that only a portion of any research grant that Moskowitz obtained in his retirement would enure to him as income--much of it would go for lab and other expenses). He might very well be unable to prove...