College and university campuses are not just schools. They are also workplaces. Workplace laws generally apply to protect instructors, assistants, administrators, operations personnel, and others who work on campus, including students working as teaching assistants, research assistants, dormitory resident assistants, and other roles. One of those protections is against a hostile work environment. If a school employee has accused yemplou of creating a hostile work environment, you have your job, education, reputation, and relationships on the line. Let the Lento Law Firm's Student Defense Team help you defend against hostile work environment charges. Call 888.535.3686 now or use our contact form to tell us about your case.
School Responsibility to Avoid a Hostile Work Environment
Federal anti-discrimination employment laws, backed by similar state laws, define a hostile work environment. Certain forms of harassment based on protected characteristics like sex, race, religion, age, and disability violate those anti-discrimination laws. Employers must not force their employees to work in a sexually or racially charged environment or an environment hostile to another protected characteristic. If you cause or contribute to a hostile work environment at your college or university, you may not necessarily be personally civilly liable. But your school is very likely to promptly take disciplinary action against you to protect the school's employees and to avoid school civil liability for that hostile workplace. Schools have a legal responsibility to manage their workplaces to avoid creating and maintaining hostile work environments. Schools take those obligations seriously. Expect swift and sure school action if you face hostile work environment charges.
Potential Impacts of Hostile Work Environment Charges
You could lose your school employment to prompt job termination if you face charges that you caused or contributed to a hostile work environment. But because of your school's substantial interest in avoiding hostile work environments, you could also face school suspension and expulsion or other forms of school discipline if you cause or contribute to a hostile work environment. Whether you are simply a student or both a student and school employee, you could face a school disciplinary proceeding for creating a hostile work environment on campus or at a school event. College and university student codes of conduct, like the Student Code of Conduct at the University of Florida, generally prohibit disrupting school employment. Those codes authorize disciplinary charges, hearings, and sanctions.
If you lose your school enrollment to suspension or expulsion, you could also lose your school housing, dining services, transportation, health services, health insurance, recreational facilities, and other benefits of school enrollment. The crippling impact may reach not only you but also your family members. Take disciplinary charges seriously. You may have both your present lifestyle and future goals on the line when facing hostile work environment charges. Get our help to defend and defeat those charges.
Defining a Hostile Work Environment
Work can be difficult. Workplace disagreements and disputes can contribute to the natural challenges that work presents. Not every workplace stress is illegal. Not every disagreement in the workplace constitutes a hostile work environment. You generally want to get along with co-workers at school, or if you are not a school employee but simply a student, not to unduly disturb or disrupt their work. You generally want to treat school employees courteously. But disagreements do occur. Hostility can even arise. Yet an unlawfully hostile workplace requires more than mere hostility. Petty slights and annoyances, and isolated non-serious incidents, do not constitute a hostile work environment. According to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforcement guidelines, a hostile work environment must include (1) unwelcome conduct based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, older age, disability, or genetics, including family medical history, that is (2) so severe or pervasive as to create a work environment that reasonable persons would consider intimidating, hostile, or abusive.
Conduct Contributing to a Hostile Work Environment
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforcement guidelines give some examples of the kind of conduct that could, even sufficiently severe or pervasive, give rise to a hostile work environment. Those examples include “offensive jokes, slurs, epithets or name-calling, physical assaults or threats, intimidation, ridicule or mockery, insults or put-downs, offensive objects or pictures, and interference with work performance.” Keep in mind that these actions must generally have some connection with race, color, religion, sex, or other protected characteristic. Racially offensive jokes would qualify, while politically offensive jokes might not. Sexual slurs would qualify, while slurs about work or other performances might not. Repeated, prolonged, or continuous conduct, in a racially or sexually offensive pattern, makes a hostile work environment more likely, while isolated incidents, unless severe, may not. Also, keep in mind that you may face hostile work environment charges whether you are simply a student without any campus job or you are both a student and an employee.
Who May Bring a Hostile Work Environment Charge
Student misconduct in a classroom could give rise to a hostile work environment charge. But college and university workplaces go well beyond the classroom. School personnel, whether students or non-students, also work in clinical settings, laboratories, dining halls and other food services, dormitories, bookstores and other retail outlets, recreational facilities, sports stadiums, and arenas, and anywhere else the school conducts activities or maintains grounds. Don't assume that your informal interaction with a working student or non-student personnel is outside of workplace protections simply because you are not in an instructional setting. You could see a hostile work environment charge from a resident assistant, retail worker, custodian, security officer, lab technician, teaching or research assistant, bus driver, intramural director, coach, academic advisor, or any other school employee.
Hostile Work Environment Disciplinary Procedures
When you face hostile work environment charges as a student, your college or university is likely to bring those charges under a student conduct code like the University of Florida code cited above. Student conduct codes regulate not only academic misconduct but also behavioral misconduct, including disrupting school employment. If another student or student employee complains of your actions creating a hostile work environment, you may also face charges under a Title IX policy.
Fortunately, these codes offer accused students protective procedures. They must generally do so to satisfy constitutional due process and contractual rights you may have with your college or university. Due process means procedural fairness. Your school shouldn't railroad you to an unfair decision adversely affecting your property and liberty interests. The University of Washington Student Conduct Policy for Academic and Behavioral Misconduct is an example. It provides elaborate procedures that our attorneys can help you invoke to challenge hostile work environment disciplinary charges. Those procedures may include:
- notice of the alleged misconduct, including its date, time, and place, and the evidence supporting the charges;
- an opportunity to participate in the school's investigation, including submitting to interview and providing documentation;
- a right to review the investigation report and results, including to comment on and correct the report;
- an opportunity to participate in a conciliation conference at which the accuser and school disciplinary officials attend;
- if charges do not resolve voluntarily, the right to a hearing before an independent official or panel, at which you may present your account and evidence while challenging the other side's account and evidence and
- a right to review and challenge the hearing decision, including a right to appeal adverse results to a higher school official or panel.
Adjudicating Hostile Work Environment Charges
Hostile work environment charges often involve disagreements over who said or did what, with what demeanor and motivations. Hostile work environment charges can be difficult for a decision-maker to resolve. The accuser may have taken offense by hearing statements or interpreting actions in a way that the accused did not intend. Hostile work environment charges can also have a substantial degree of subjectivity to them. What is funny to one person may be offensive to another. The accuser's participation in the exchanges that the accuser later claims were hostile and offensive may further inject uncertainty into the outcome. The accuser's participation may have appeared to the accused to mean that the statements and conduct were not offensive but instead were welcome.
Adjudicating hostile work environment charges can thus require a close examination of hotly contested, diametrically opposed presentations of competing and conflicting evidence. Investigators may have to interview several witnesses, trying to resolve discrepancies in their accounts. Hearing officials may have to consider carefully the ability of witnesses to observe, recall, and relate their observations without bias or interest. Hearing officials may have to make close calls on the credibility of witnesses, aided by cross-examination of those witnesses. They may also have to rely on documentary or circumstantial evidence, construed and interpreted in the full context.
Defending Hostile Work Environment Charges
The difficulty of adjudicating hostile work environment charges makes getting our help all the more important. Our Student Defense Team can help you invoke the above protective procedures to defend against hostile work environment charges. As difficult as hostile work environment charges can be to defend, you can be at a distinct disadvantage when going up against school officials who have substantial experience in academic administrative matters. You are not at all on a level playing field when without skilled and experienced representation. Our attorneys' services may include any one, several, or all of the following actions:
- helping you obtain, review, and evaluate a detailed description of the school's charges and the school's evidence;
- helping you timely, firmly, and clearly answer the charges with your available defenses and evidence;
- helping you identify, acquire, and present statements, documents, and other evidence exonerating you from the charges or mitigating their impact;
- helping you attend, negotiate, and advocate at early informal resolution conferences before formal proceedings commence;
- helping you attend and participate in the formal hearing, including presenting your evidence while challenging the other side's evidence through cross-examination of adverse witnesses;
- helping you review the school's decision and appeal any adverse decisions, including researching and drafting the appeal brief.
Special Relief from Hostile Work Environment Charges
You may have already lost all hearings and appeals before considering retaining the skilled and experienced representation you needed. Your college or university may have already found you responsible for creating a hostile work environment and may have suspended or expelled you while terminating your school employment. If so, do not despair. Our Student Defense Team has earned a reputation and developed relationships with general counsel offices and outside retained counsel throughout the country to be able to reach and advocate with those and other school oversight officials. Colleges and universities have their routine disciplinary procedures. But they also have oversight officials and offices to ensure that the school protects its reputation and avoids unnecessary regulatory and liability risks.
Our attorneys may be able to reach your school's oversight officials with an effective presentation of the school's greater interests in resolving your matter with your school reinstatement and other relief from hostile work environment charges. We may be able to help you and the school identify a creative win-win resolution that restores your enrollment in good standing and preserves your educational goals while respecting the school's interests. Consult our skilled and experienced attorneys, even if you have already lost all hearings and appeals. We may also be able to identify civil litigation options.
Premier Defense for Hostile Work Environment Charges
The Lento Law Firm's Student Defense Team is available nationwide to help you defend against hostile work environment charges. You may have everything on the line when facing such charges. Don't risk your educational and vocational future by going it alone when facing hostile work environment charges. Our attorneys have helped hundreds of students nationwide negotiate or win effective relief from hostile work environment charges and other disciplinary charges. Call 888.535.3686 now or use our contact form to tell us about your case.
