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October 23, 2008, 04:09 PM ET
Gender-Bias Gadfly Summons Others to Bite Columbia U.
Having settled her own long-running legal battle against Columbia University, the prominent economist Graciela Chichilnisky is now urging other women on the faculty there to band together to press similar claims of gender bias and to sue, if necessary, to get equal pay.
And Ms. Chichilnisky, a professor of economics and statistics, is hoping to get the women she brings together to form something Columbia’s administrators and lawyers have not confronted before: a “trust” representing aggrieved faculty members, similar to the legal trusts that have been formed on behalf of the plaintiffs in some major civil lawsuits.
A lawyer who advised Ms. Chichilnisky in her settlement talks, Jan R. Schlichtmann, knows a thing or two about forming such legal entities. In the course of a career in civil litigation that inspired a Hollywood movie — John Travolta portrayed him in A Civil Action — Mr. Schlichtmann has represented trusts established for people affected by a warehouse explosion in Danvers, Mass., and for New England communities where shade trees have been harmed by leaks from natural-gas pipelines. (He did not return several calls seeking comment.)
For her part, Ms. Chichilnisky is claiming victory in the settlement she reached with Columbia in June, citing provisions that award her $200,000 — on top of $500,000 from an earlier agreement — as well as continued employment as a tenured professor and office space she had sought.
The university, however, has sounded a similarly triumphant note. It issued a statement on the settlement that says: “After years of fruitless litigation and trial days in which a number of her key claims were dismissed by the court or shown to be groundless, Prof. Chichilnisky agreed to a public and binding settlement for a fraction of the money she had sought in which she specifically acknowledged that her salary was not discriminatory and dropped all of her current and past claims against the university.” —Peter Schmidt
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