An ex-faculty member at Tufts University sued the university and a prominent professor last week, alleging that she was sacked in retaliation for accusing the male professor of discriminating against female and minority employees and because she is gay, The Boston Globe reports. The reporter, Peter Schworm, writes:
Susan Lautze, a researcher on humanitarianism who co-founded the Feinstein International Center at Tufts in 1996, says she was fired in 2005 after she accused her supervisor, Peter Walker, of harboring bias toward women and nonwhites.
Before she was fired, she told Tufts officials that Walker was trumping up reasons to fire her because of a bias against her as “an openly gay woman and someone who has campaigned for the protection of marginalized populations,” according to the suit.
The civil suit, filed last week in Middlesex Superior Court, names Tufts and Walker, who has directed the Feinstein International Center since 2002, as defendants. Lautze, who now lives in France, is seeking $360,000 in lost wages and damages.
A Tufts spokeswoman said yesterday that university officials had not yet received the lawsuit but denied the allegations in a statement.
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