Professor-v.-Professor Defamation Suit Can Go Forward, Based on Defendant’s Statements to Students
From Porter v. Sergent, decided yesterday by Sixth Circuit Judge Raymond Kethledge, joined by Judges Richard Griffin and John Bush:
Professor David Porter sued his former employer, Berea College, for employment discrimination, retaliation, and breach of contract, and he sued his former colleague, Professor F. Tyler Sergent, for defamation, portrayal in a false light, and retaliation….
In describing the facts for purposes of summary judgment, we view the record in the light most favorable to Porter.
David Porter, a white male in his late 60s, was a tenured professor of psychology and general studies at Berea College from 2005 until September 2018. In March 2017, a younger female colleague, Wendy Williams, initiated a Title IX complaint against the then-chair of the psychology department, Wayne Messer, for allegedly creating a hostile-work environment for women. Two of Williams’s female colleagues later joined the complaint. Porter served as Messer’s advisor throughout the grievance proceedings. In September 2017, a disciplinary board found Messer guilty, and Berea’s president, Lyle Roelofs, removed Messer as department chair. Soon afterward, in email exchanges with President Roelofs and Dean Chad Berry, and in an open letter to campus, Porter said that the proceedings against Messer had been flawed and unfair.
In February 2018, for one of his psychology courses, Porter created a survey to measure “community perceptions and attitudes about academic freedom, freedom of speech, and hostile work environments under civil rights law.” The survey contained hypothetical scenarios based on Porter’s observations of Messer’s Title IX investigation. But the survey did not include any names, and its instructions disclaimed any “relationship between these scenarios and actual events, either here at Berea College or elsewhere.” Porter shared the survey with a few of his colleagues, including Messer, who worried that it might be “highly inflammatory.”
Porter later emailed the survey to all the students and faculty at Berea, which stirred controversy on campus. Williams posted on Facebook that she was “one of the not anonymous targets of [the] survey,” and that the scenarios were a “biased portrayal” of her Title IX complaints. Dean Berry asked Porter to remove the survey from the internet, and Porter later sent a campus-wide email in which he apologized for the survey’s flaws and for its negative impact on Berea’s students and faculty.
On February 22, 2018, President Roelofs sent Porter a letter notifying him that Dean Berry had initiated disciplinary proceedings to seek Porter’s dismissal. Attached to the letter was a “statement of grounds for dismissal,” which asserted (among other things) that Porter’s survey had harmed his students and colleagues. The letter itself cited a provision of Berea’s Faculty Manual, which said faculty can be terminated for cause if they engage in “personal conduct which demonstrably hinders fulfillment of professional responsibilities.” In the letter, Roelofs suspended Porter with pay and told him to stay off campus except to attend disciplinary hearings.
F. Tyler Sergent is a history professor at Berea, a faculty advisor to the Student Government Association (SGA), and Williams’s husband. After Porter’s suspension, the SGA voted to give Port
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