A judge has dismissed a former UCLA Anderson School of Management professor’s gender discrimination lawsuit in which she alleged she experienced retaliation when she complained about her workplace conditions.
In her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit, Jennifer Walske alleged gender discrimination, harassment, retaliation, hostile work environment, failure to prevent discrimination and both intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. She maintained she experienced a backlash retaliation for complaining that female faculty members were subjected to disparate treatment by the business school administration.
Walske’s attorneys dropped her intentional infliction of emotional distress claim in April. On June 14, Judge Bruce Iwasaki granted a motion by the UC Regents to toss out the plaintiff’s remaining claims, finding there was no evidence to support them and that therefore there were no triable issues.
In her suit filed in June 2022, Walske maintained that she was the latest in a long line of faculty and staff who have been retaliated against for coming forward with legitimate complaints of discrimination, harassment and retaliation.
“In Dr. Walske’s case, UCLA and its agents not only retaliated against her for reporting the discrimination and harassment, but also, when she reported the retaliation, the university doubled down and retaliated against her even further,” the suit stated.
Walske is an award-winning professor and in 2018, she was recruited the Anderson School from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley to be an adjunct assistant professor, as well as roles as interim faculty director for Impact@Anderson, an academic center promoting equity and sustainability through social impact work, and as a research fellow in the Price Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, the suit stated.
Walske reported, among other things, that her immediate supervisor, UCLA Anderson School’s then-Interim Dean, Alfred Osborne Jr., made inappropriate gender-related comments to her, treated male faculty more favorably and appeared to be engaged in an improper relationship with a female subordinate, resulting in a hostile work environment for those female faculty and staff who were not in a relationship with him, the suit states.
In their court papers in support of the dismissal motion, UC Regents attorneys stated that Walske was an adjunct professor and that there was no guarantee her appointment be renewed each academic year. Moreover, Walske had mixed ratings from students who raised concerns regarding her work and she has no legal grounds for seeking punitive damages, the UC lawyers further contended.
When UCLA offered Walske alternative courses to teach after the ones she had were removed, she refused to teach any courses at all and the Anderson School had to scramble to find someone else to teach those classes, according to the UC lawyers’ pleadings.
Sanjay Sood, the Anderson School faculty chairman from July 1, 2019, to June 30, 2023, stated in a sworn declaration that he made a non-retaliatory decision to not renew Walske’s contract.
“The decisions I made regarding Walske’s employment had nothing to do with her complaints and I would have made the same decision regardless of any complaint,” Sood said while adding that he did not intent to cause the plaintiff emotional distress.