A jury has awarded a tenured Cal State Los Angeles biology professor $1 million in his lawsuit contending he suffered a backlash from administrators unhappy with his favorable testimony on behalf of a colleague who also alleged retaliation.
A Los Angeles Superior Court panel reached its verdict in favor of plaintiff Patrick Krug on July 28 after a lengthy trial in the courtroom of Judge Steven A. Ellis. Krug sued the California State University Trustees in February 2021.
Krug is a biology professor who was selected by his faculty peers as professor of the year in 2017. In 2015, Krug began a role as faculty athletics representative.
“He was universally loved and respected — until, that is, his role as a witness in the sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation claims brought by his former female colleague in the Athletics Division, Sheila Hudson,” Krug’s lawyers stated in their court papers.
The CSU pressured Krug to side with them and against Hudson, but he resisted the CSU’s alleged coercion and testified truthfully in her lawsuit, providing corroborating information that “only he was brave enough to reveal,” according to Krug’s attorneys’ court papers.
“Tagged as an adversary to CSU, plaintiff became unwelcome in athletics and from that point forward, he was systematically frozen out from effectively functioning” as the faculty athletics representative, the plaintiff’s lawyers further state in their court papers.
At least five of CSU’s administrators knew of Krug’s “protected activity” in testifying on Hudson’s behalf, including the university counsel, who called the plaintiff “adversarial to the university” and disparaged Krug when talking to key administrators, Krug’s attorneys stated in their court papers.
When Krug rejected an offer from another administrator to call Hudson’s claims “meritless” in exchange for more money in the faculty athletics representative role, the administrator became furious and helped provide the same benefit to Krug’s temporary replacement, according to Krug’s attorneys’ court papers, which further state that the university rejected internal complaint claims.
Realizing that the freeze-out had the desired chilling effect on plaintiff’s ability to act as faculty athletics representative, he reluctantly resigned from the position because he recognized that the NCAA and the students, coaches and others in the Athletics Division needed to have a person in the job whom administrators would actually interact with and allow to do the job,” Krug’s attorneys stated in their court papers.
In their court papers, CSU attorneys stated that Krug had no damages because he still had his tenured job and his pay was never reduced. The lawyers also said that pre-trial discovery allegedly revealed Krug had shown “egregious violations of university policy, including shockingly racist and sexually degrading statements, that would have disqualified him from commencing or continuing in the faculty athletics representative role had such violations been known sooner.”