A federal judge sided with Penn State last week in a lawsuit brought by a tenured associate professor at a commonwealth campus who claimed he was wrongfully denied a promotion, granting the university’s request to rule in its favor as a matter of law.
U.S. Circuit Judge D. Michael Fisher’s 29-page ruling issued Thursday gave Penn State a victory before a potential trial.
He found Penn State Behrend associate professor of electrical engineering Sudarshan Nelatury failed to allege sufficient evidence to support his claims of discrimination, retaliation and breach of contract. Fisher also found the university had legitimate reasons for not promoting Nelatury to full professor.
There was “simply a disagreement,” the judge wrote, between the Nelatury and the university about the merits of his academic work, his teaching abilities and academic needs at the campus near Erie.
“That disagreement does not warrant a trial,” Fisher wrote.
A message left Wednesday morning with Nelatury’s attorney was not immediately returned. A Penn State spokesman said the university was “pleased” with the decision but otherwise deferred to its responses filed in court.
In those public documents, the university did not hold back in its explanation of why it denied Nelatury’s “unjustified” request to be promoted to full professor.
The university’s attorneys said Nelatury’s quality of research and journal publications significantly declined in the years after he became an associate professor and received tenure. They also said his teaching performance was “inconsistent.”
Nelatury — who is Asian, of Indian national origin and in his 60s — alleged he was not recommended for a promotion because of discrimination, but Penn State cast those claims as meritless.
“Dr. Nelatury was not recommended for promotion based on significant concerns about his performance as a teacher and the declining and low quality of his research and scholarship expressed by every committee and individual who evaluated him as part of the promotion process,” Penn State’s attorneys wrote in a February filing. “None of those concerns had anything to do with his sex, race, national origin, or age, or that he had complained about discrimination.”
Nelatury had argued in his lawsuit that his publication record trumped that of even the chancellor and department chair, but that claim also failed to hold up against scrutiny.
A school committee made up of three professors that functioned as the first of four levels of review found Nelatury’s teaching record to be “mixed.”
There was high variability among student reviews of teaching effectiveness. Many of the lower scores were from introductory and lower-division courses, the judge wrote in his ruling. The committee found Nelatury effectively taught top students, but was unable to connect with almost half of them — a “major weakness.”
The committee also noted external reviews of his research were mixed and his service was unremarkable. The committee unanimously voted to not recommend promotion, believing his record is “not of the type that is typically associated with those promoted to professor.”
Two other levels of review sided with many of the committee’s findings. Only one committee recommended Nelatury be promoted. In his ruling, Fisher wrote Nelatury “ignores significant evidence that his research record did not warrant promotion.”
Nelatury has authored eight books, four book chapters, 23 book chapters and 37 peer-reviewed journal papers in addition to 48 papers in open-access journals. He has been a recipient of the “Outstanding Research Award” and “Council of Fellows Research Award.”
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