Sexual Harassment of Students by Faculty Members

Litigation

To date, no case of sexual harassment of students by faculty members in colleges and universities has made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The judiciary does look to the Court's judgment in Gebser v. Lago Vista Independent School District (1998) for guidance in setting the standard for liability of educational institutions and their officials. Gebser involved a teacher at a Texas high school who engaged in sexual relations with one of his students. In Gebser, the Court held that educational institutions that are the recipients of federal financial assistance are liable for damages based on sexual harassment of students by faculty members only if officials with the authority to correct the harassment had actual notice of, and were deliberately indifferent to, the actions of harassers. In other words, institutions are not likely to be liable unless officials had actual knowledge of incidents of misconduct but chose not to respond. The following cases are representative of the growing body of case law dealing with sexual harassment of college and university students by faculty members.

In Hayut v. State University of New York (2003), a student filed suit against a faculty member who continually addressed her as “Monica,” a reference to the well-known sexual scandal involving President Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. In affirming the rejection of an earlier motion for summary judgment entered by the faculty member and university, the Second Circuit permitted the case to proceed on the basis that a reasonable person could have concluded that his calling the student such a name created a hostile environment.

Along the same line, a long-running case involving a coach rather than a faculty member was litigated in a dispute from North Carolina. The Fourth Circuit held that the coach's inquiries into the sex lives of the members of the women's soccer team, if proven to be sufficiently “severe or pervasive,” would have created a hostile environment in violation of Title IX. Consequently, the court affirmed a lower court's decision that the plaintiff's claim could proceed (Jennings v. University of North Carolina, 2007).

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