Theater Professor Sues College

By Kevin C. Hudak | Friday, January 20, 2006

Like any other institution of similar prestige, the College has been involved with many lawsuits since its chartering, including the 1819 Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (“It is, sir, as I have said, a small college”). The Review has even sued the College in the past, successfully reversing the suspensions of several staffers who published transcripts of a music professor’s unintelligible classes and were later assaulted by him. Although the Review has not found any record of the College ever being sued by a professor, there is no doubt that such lawsuits have appeared in the past.

The suit that Mara Sabinson has filed against the College is intriguing and involves a combination of professors and administrators, most notably Dean of the Faculty Carol Folt and her deputy, Associate Dean of the Humanities Lenore Grenoble. In a complaint filed November 28, 2005 in federal district court, theater professor Mara Sabinson of Mara Sabinson v. Trustees of Dartmouth College contends that, “Dartmouth College, through a group of their officers, has taken action…which constitutes harassment and discrimination against her on the basis of her age, her gender, and her religion and further constitutes a breach of her contract of employment.” In addition to several other factors, Professor Sabinson’s claim seems to be motivated by her assignment to Dartmouth’s First-Year writing seminars rather than her advanced theater classes Without a doubt, Sabinson’s attitude towards the writing program is less than enthusiastic, and the story of her history at Dartmouth, her fall from grace, her spats with powerful administrators, as well as her reassignment to the writing program (a move she terms “punishment”) make up the bulk of her complaint.

Mara Sabinson was hired by the College in 1984 as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Drama, and then rehired as a permanent member of the drama-cum-theater department. As early as 1988, then-Dean of the Faculty C. Dwight Lair characterized her as “brusque and intolerant,” though she was evaluated for a three year period and granted tenure and named Associate Professor of Theater in 1991. Within another year, she was made Chair of the Theater Department. She would serve as Chair from 1992 to 1997 and 1999 to 2002, as well as serve on the relevant departmental committees. Sabinson believes that “Over these years, [she] developed a controversial reputation for demanding excellence and supporting minority participation in the Department.”

Beginning in July of 2002, Professor Sabinson went on a year-long sabbatical, during which time Associate Dean of the Humanities Lenore Grenoble took over as Chair of the Theater Department. The department was placed in “receivership,” a classification that allows the Associate Dean to take over leadership of departments she feels could benefit from such a change. In her December 21, 2005 affidavit, Dean Grenoble claimed that “the inability of the faculty in that department to work together was interfering with the ability of the department to serve the needs of the students within the department.”

In her sworn affidavit dated January 5, 2006, Professor Sabinson detailed how she was removed from her traditional responsibilities, including her advanced acting classes, her role as director of numerous Hopkins Center plays, and her membership on committees within the Theater Department. Sabinson also claims to have suffered a reduction in her annual raises, at one point in June of 2003 receiving a raise of $0.

During this time, Dean Grenoble described a few notable incidents involving Sabinson, her colleagues in the theater department, and students. She described a production directed by Professor Sabinson in the fall of 2000 where “concerns were raised by fellow faculty members, students and staff associated with the production.” She claims that previous theater productions had seen the same issues. Grenoble also detailed a series of concerns in late 2000 and early 2001 that centered on Sabinson’s interactions with students and faculty, as well as “staffing and scheduling issues.” A 2001 letter from former Dean of the Faculty Edward Berger criticized Sabinson for causing “a high degree of ‘acrimony’ in [sic] her colleagues,” while he claimed that students continued to “advise him of her unacceptable behavior,” and that “the department was demoralized.” However, one student who took Sabinson’s class in the summer of 2004, Stacy Kourlis ’06, described her as a good professor who “interested all of us in the intricacies of studying a role. She was never over the top, making acting inaccessible or taking it too seriously…she made us willing to work at loving acting, and I think that most of us did.”

During Professor Sabinson’s sabbatical, Chair Grenoble revised the Acting III course, citing, “Because only one section of this course is offered each year, students who had difficulty working with Professor Sabinson refused to take the course, causing disruption to their education and to the functioning of the department.” Within her purview as Associate Dean of the Humanities, Grenoble formed an “outside review committee” composed of Dean Malcolm Morrison of the Hartt School of Music at the University of Hartford, actress Anne Torsiglieri, and Dartmouth’s own English professor Peter Saccio. According to Grenoble’s affidavit, “The committee advised us that based on the input it received, it considered Professor Sabinson to have a ‘corrosive’ effect on the department and stressed the urgency of dealing with the adverse impact she was having on the educational program of the Theater Department.” Dean Carol Folt, Provost Scherr, and Grenoble then decided that one solution would be to assign Sabinson to courses that were “consistent with her abilities” and “less likely to damage the opportunities for students to be successful within the program.” Professor Sabinson envisioned the committee as “appointed by Ms. Grenoble with her secret intention of examining my conduct in an unannounced and irregularly conducted post-tenure review.”

June 3, 2005 saw a contentious meeting between prof. Sabinson and administrators Folt, Scherr, and Grenoble. After not hearing of any specific complaints against her for some time, Professor Sabinson wrote that “Ms. Folt began by saying that they wanted to change the Theater Department and asked [her] to resign.” She claimed she offered her two years’ severance pay, and that when she asked who had complained about her teaching, Dean Folt refused to answer, while Provost Scherr referred to student complaints in 2001 and Dean Grenoble screamed at her. When Sabinson attempted to refute these complaints, she received the following a threat from Dean Folt: “If you choose to stay, we will limit your teaching in the theater department. We are considering sending you to the writing program,” Sabinson recalled, “This would essentially exclude me from my profession in the theater department and make me wish I had resigned.”

Grenoble claims that the meeting was “professional in nature and certainly not threatening.” Dean Carol Folt, according to Grenoble, “sensitively discussed with Professor Sabinson the possibility of her being happier in places other than Dartmouth and that this was an opportunity to discuss a severance package if she elected that course.” Provost Scherr in a December 21, 2005 affidavit, wrote, “At no point during the meeting did Dean Folt or anyone else refer to or say anything that could be remotely interpreted as a reference to Professor Sabinson’s age, gender or religion.”

Professor Sabinson was upset following the meeting, as both accounts include allusions to her resigning and finding employment elsewhere after her twenty-two years at Dartmouth. Upon returning to the Theater Department, Sabinson alleges that Professor Margaret Spicer “said she knew of the threats and advised her to ‘go to California and find yourself a nice rabbi,’” and that “Ms. Spicer and others had been critical of [her] female Jewish style from before she received her tenure.”

Spicer, however, argues in a December 21, 2005 affidavit that she was referring to a 2005 production of Wendy Wasserstein’s play, “Third,” in which a college professor falls for a rabbi and marries him in California. She contextualizes the statement by saying, “Just like the character you played in Wendy’s play, maybe it’s time to find your Rabbi and move to California and start a whole new life.”

Professor Sabinson, in responding to Spicer’s affidavit, reported that “Ms. Spicer is a long-time antagonist of mine” and that “It was not the first example of her sexist and racist attitudes.” In her affidavit, Sabinson goes on to suggest that as Chair of the department she received “complaints on numerous occasions from students, staff, faculty, and visitors about her sexist and racist actions.” Needless to say, there were changes being made in the Theater Department and it seems as if more than a few professors and administrators thought that Professor Sabinson’s style and attitude would be detrimental to their plans.

Following the meeting and an August 8, 2005 complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), Sabinson was notified that she would be teaching “Acting for the Camera” and three First-Year seminars on topics to be determined throughout the 2005-2006 year. Sabinson responded to Grenoble’s e-mail about her course assignments, “I regard your thought of courses outside the department to be harassment which you promised if I did not accept your terms.” Sabinson claims that Professor Peter Hackett, the new chair of the theater department, was complicit in Grenoble’s course changes, saying that “the change was based on my lack of a terminal degree and failure to continue my prior professional acting career.”

Professor Sabinson did not only regard teaching a First-Year seminars as a backward step in her career, but thought herself neither prepared nor qualified to teach one. In her affidavit, Sabinson wrote, “I am not an expository writer and cannot competently teach the First Year Writing Seminars.” Sabinson also described what appears to be nepotism in the Theater Department and in the College’s hiring procedures. She writes that her scheduled Acting II class “has been assigned to the wife of the new Chair [Hackett] of the Department who is not herself a regular member of the Department and was not hired under the normal procedures at Dartmouth.” She went on to describe the foreseeable consequences of her assignment to the First-Year Writing Program:

The purpose and effect of my new assignment is:
— to exclude me from my profession and field of scholarship;
— to humiliate me before my colleagues, students, and staff;
— to set me up to fail at teaching a subject for which I am not competent
— to prevent me from qualifying for future pay raises and promotions; and
— to force me to resign my tenured position.

Professor Sabinson’s attitude towards her reassignment can also be assessed from the course description originally submitted to Dean Grenoble for Theater 7, “Theater for Social Change”:

Based on the work of Brazilian director, teacher and theorist Augusto Boal, this course will examine the place of the actor in effecting social change and the role of integrity in creating a vital contemporary theater. For our investigation we will focus on the treatment of female faculty members by the administration of Dartmouth College . Students will conduct research, keep research journals, write reports and create written skits and scenes theatricalizing their findings. Readings will include articles and chapters featuring historical examples of theater for social change, as well as current and on-going practices of Dartmouth College. Emphasis will be on class participation. This course is dependent on the outcome of current litigation .” (emphasis added)

The course description is not listed on the registrar website or in the First-Year Writing Program listings, and Sabinson contends that Hackett “censored the content of my winter First-Year Seminar, and demanded arbitrary and punitive deadlines and procedures applied only to me.”

While she claimed to be incapable of teaching a writing seminar, Professor Sabinson was permitted to teach one in the Women and Gender Studies Program in the Spring of 2005. WGST 7, entitled “The Fallen Woman,” had two course reviews available on the Student Assembly Course Guide as of the time of publishing. Excerpts follow:

However, she is funny at times becuse [sic] she is absentminded. The class is really easy as far as work becuse [sic] we basically watched movies every period nad [sic] only had two papers and a research paper. She is a very hard grader though, but she allows you an infinite # of rewrites so getting a good final grade shouldnt [sic] be a problem.
The professor should not be teaching a first year seminar. The [Teaching Assistant] didn’t help and the papers were graded harshly.

When contacted for comment, the head of the Writing Program, Prof. Tom Cormen, claimed that he had never heard of complaints like those of Professor Sabinson regarding the Writing Program, and that “Many faculty members enjoy teaching First-Year Seminars and request to teach them year after year.” Regardless, the nine students currently enrolled in her class are being taught by someone who obviously does not want to be there and complains of a lack of the requisite expository writing skills. One student in Sabinson’s class this term noted that she is “really passionate about the subject,” but that she is also “one of the more laid-back professors” who “stresses learning over grades.” Unless they listened to Professor Sabinson’s complaints, hypothetically they would never have known of her performance beyond student evaluations, as she claims that “no one in my department or the administration has observed my teaching since before I received tenure.”

The most surprising, but least covered, of Sabinson’s complaints is that of sexual, age, and religious discrimination in the Department of Theater’s treatment of her and students. In affidavit she claims:

But there is another history of the Department concerning disharmony exclusive of and involving me, and, in particular, racial and sexual discrimination complaints from students, staff, and faculty. The former head of the Affirmative Action Office, Mary Childers, attempted unsuccessfully to mediate these issues. In general, my support of minority claims was not popular with the administration, particularly not with Mr. Scherr. And contrary to his statement, he was fully informed of complaints of racism and sexism in the Department that had been reported to Affirmative Action and the Deans on several occasions.

In response to these charges of discrimination and Professor Sabinson’s lawsuit, the Dartmouth Public Affairs Office released the following statement dated January 16, 2006 by College General Counsel Robert B. Donin to The Dartmouth Review :

We are disappointed that Professor Sabinson decided to sue the College. Dartmouth is strongly committed to diversity and did not discriminate against Professor Sabinson or violate any of her rights as a faculty member. The federal court has already ruled that she has no likelihood of prevailing on her claims, and has denied her request for a preliminary injunction.

The statement was sent to the Review after staffers attempted to contact Professor Spicer, Deans Folt and Grenoble, Provost Scherr, and Mr. Donin. Professor Sabinson’s attorney, K. William Clauson, Esq. of Hanover, NH stood behind the evidence within the complaint. Dartmouth’s representation, Bruce W. Felmly and Linsa S. Johnson of McLane, Graf, Raulerson & Middleton of Manchester, NH, declined to add any comment to the College’s public statement.

A lawyer experienced in employment law contacted by the Review predicted the case would hinge on whether or not the court recognizes “legally-cognizable adverse action.” Professor Sabinson was neither fired nor formally demoted, and her official salary was not reduced. Particularly devastating to Sabinson’s case are Professor Spicer and Provost Scherr’s affidavits which refute sexual, age, and religious discrimination, as Spicer is a woman and older than Sabinson while Scherr is Jewish.

Prof. Sabinson may be successful in her lawsuit and be reinstated to her acting classes, or the College mayprevail. Regardless of the case’s outcome, however, the strife, litigation, and disdain for the First-Year writing classes that normally fly under the radar have been brought into the limelight.

Theater Professor Sues College

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