Inside Higher Ed: Ohio Court Unravels Professor’s Victory in Age Discrimination Case
It is probably cold comfort to Robert Lipset that the three judges of the Ohio Court of Appeals who heard his age discrimination case against Ohio University acknowledged in their ruling that the university may have paid too little heed to his teaching excellence, saying that “we, if sitting as Lipset’s promotion and tenure committee, may have valued educational considerations over financial and research considerations. It is unfortunate that the ability to teach students may not be as highly valued as the ability to procure research funds.”
But the comfort almost certainly ended there, given that the Ohio court roundly rejected the victory that the former Ohio assistant professor won in 2006 from the state’s Civil Rights Commission, which ordered the university to offer Lipset a tenured associate professor position and award him $266,000 in back pay after finding “reliable, probative and substantive evidence” that it had denied him tenure in 2001 because of his age. (Lipset was 51 at the time he was turned down for tenure, and the industrial and manufacturing systems engineering department cited “significant reservations about [his] commitment to funded research and … progress towards an identifiable personal research track” in rejecting him)
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