Vengalattore v. Cornell Univ.

36 F.4th 87

Dr. Mukund VENGALATTORE, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.CORNELL UNIVERSITY, Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education, and U.S. Department of Education, Defendants-Appellees.^*

Docket No. 20-1514

August Term, 2020

United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.

Argued: April 14, 2021

Decided: June 2, 2022

CALEB KRUCKENBERG, Washington, DC (Margaret A. Little, Richard A. Samp, New Civil Liberties Alliance, Washington, DC, on the brief), for Plaintiff-Appellant.

MICHAEL L. BANKS, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Emily Reineberg, Morgan Lewis & Bockius, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Wendy E. Tarlow, Office of University Counsel, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, on the brief), for Defendant-Appellee Cornell University.

KAREN FOLSTER LESPERANCE, Assistant United States Attorney, Albany, New York (Antoinette T. Bacon, Acting United States Attorney for the Northern District of New York, William Larkin, Assistant United States Attorney, Albany, New York, on the brief), for Defendants-Appellees Miguel Cardona and U.S. Department of Education.

Before: KEARSE, CABRANES, and POOLER, Circuit Judges.

Judge Cabranes concurs in the judgment and opinion of the Court, and files a separate opinion.

KEARSE, Circuit Judge:

Plaintiff Mukund Vengalattore, a former Assistant Professor at defendant Cornell University ("Cornell" or the "University"), appeals from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Northern District of New York, Gary L. Sharpe, Judge , dismissing his amended complaint ("Complaint") alleging principally (A) that in disciplining him in response to his student assistant's allegation that he had an inappropriate relationship with her, Cornell discriminated against him on the basis of gender and national origin in violation of, respectively, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, 20 U.S.C. § 1681 et seq . ("Title IX"), and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq . ("Title VI"); and (B) that defendants United States Department of Education and its Secretary (the "federal defendants") violated the Administrative Procedure Act ("APA"), 5 U.S.C. § 551 et seq ., and the Spending Clause of the Constitution in issuing guidance documents that caused or contributed to Cornell's gender discrimination. The district court granted Cornell's motion for judgment on the pleadings and/or summary judgment, ruling principally that Title IX does not authorize a private right of action for discrimination in employment, and that the Complaint lacked sufficient allegations of national origin discrimination to state a claim under Title VI. The court granted the federal defendants’ motion to dismiss the claims against them for lack of standing. The court also dismissed a claim by Vengalattore against Cornell under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for denial of due process, ruling that Cornell is not a state actor; and it declined to exercise pendent jurisdiction over a state-law claim against Cornell for defamation. Vengalattore challenges these rulings on appeal.

For the reasons that follow, we conclude that Title IX affords a private right of action for a university's intentional gender-based discrimination against a faculty member, and that the Complaint sufficiently asserts such a claim; we thus vacate and remand for further proceedings on Vengalattore's Title IX claim. We therefore also vacate the discretionary dismissal of his state-law claim for defamation. We affirm the dismissal of the Title VI and due process claims against Cornell, as well as the dismissal of the claims against the federal defendants.

I. BACKGROUND

Cornell's motion to dismiss requested judgment on the pleadings "and/or" summary judgment, and the district court stated that the motion was granted. Given that the court "did not purport to ... make factual findings," and assessed the Complaint's allegations, rather than any proffered evidence, "all of the facts alleged in [plaintiff's] complaint[ ] must be taken as true for purposes of review," Cannon v. University of Chicago , 441 U.S. 677, 680 n.2, 99 S.Ct. 1946, 60 L.Ed.2d 560 (1979). We also "consider ... documents incorporated into the complaint by reference." Tellabs, Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd. , 551 U.S. 308, 322, 127 S.Ct. 2499, 168 L.Ed.2d 179 (2007) (" Tellabs "). The principal factual allegations of the 846-paragraph Complaint, taken as true, are summarized below.

A. An Overview of the Complaint's Allegations as to the Events

Vengalattore is a male of Indian descent. He became a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Physics in Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences in 2009. In that position, with the aid of assistants, he designed and conducted laboratory experiments. One assistant, a graduate student--called "Jane Roe" in this litigation--worked on a Vengalattore experiment from 2009 until late 2012. She, inter alia , struggled with her lab assignments and often took professional criticism personally; was somewhat unprofessional in her language and conduct; falsely accused others of breaking lab equipment; and objected to "work[ing] long hours" as she stated would be expected of "Indians." (See Complaint ¶¶ 203, 211, 253-257, 260, 396, 407.) Roe withdrew from Vengalattore's project in November 2012. In the Spring of 2013, she told a professor who collaborated in Vengalattore's research "if I have my way, [Dr. Vengalattore] will have a hard time getting tenure." (Id . ¶ 292.)

In May 2014, during the Physics Department's consideration of Vengalattore's request for tenure, Roe sent the tenure review committee a letter alleging that Vengalattore had once angrily thrown a five-pound piece of equipment at her. In September 2014, two days after learning that the committee had recommended that tenure be granted, Roe told Physics Professor Ritchie Patterson that Vengalattore had engaged in sexual misconduct with her. That accusation was relayed to Alan Mittman, Director of Cornell's Office of Workforce Policy and Labor Relations.

Dean Gretchen Ritter, responsible for approval of tenure decisions in the College of Arts and Sciences, was informed of Roe's accusation while she was considering Vengalattore's tenure request. Mittman proceeded to conduct numerous informal interviews of Roe, keeping the Dean informed of Roe's allegations; Vengalattore was not similarly informed. (See , e.g. , id . ¶¶ 321, 327, 332-334, 340, 361.) On February 13, 2015, Dean Ritter denied Vengalattore's request for tenure. (See id . ¶¶ 336, 342.)

One business day later, Mittman, with Sarah Affel, Cornell's Title IX coordinator (the "investigators"), conducted the first interview with Roe that was recorded. In that February 16, 2015 interview, Roe told the investigators that she had been raped by Vengalattore in late 2010, and that she thereafter had a secret consensual sexual relationship with him until December 2011. (See , e.g. , id . ¶¶ 344, 349, 351.)

On February 27, 2015, Vengalattore, still unaware of Roe's accusations, appealed to the University appeals committee, challenging the denial of his request for tenure. On the next business day, March 2, Mittman summoned him to appear at the Title IX office on March 3 "to ‘review [an] alleged romantic relationship with a student under [his] supervision in or around the 2011 calendar year.’ " (Complaint ¶ 363.)

In the March 3 interview, Vengalattore was informed of Roe's allegation that he and she had had a consensual sexual relationship. Vengalattore denied it. Toward the end of the three-hour interview, he was informed that Roe also accused him of rape. He responded by asking for the assistance of counsel; the investigators told him that was not necessary, and continued with the interview. (See id . ¶¶ 369-370.) Vengalattore throughout denied having had any sexual, romantic, or other unprofessional relationship with Roe.

As described in Part I.C.1. below, the Complaint alleged that the investigation was conducted in a manner that was designed to support Roe's accusation. For example, Roe had told the investigators that the sexual relationship began during the final week of the Fall 2010 semester, on a day when Vengalattore had not come to the lab and she went to his house at 7 p.m. to check on him. She said he invited her in and began kissing her; that she initially resisted but then agreed to have sex with him; that she considered this to be rape; that she spent the night with him and went with him to the lab the following morning; and that they then had a secret consensual sexual relationship until December 2011. (See Complaint ¶¶ 344-351.) When Vengalattore asked on what date Roe claimed he had raped her, the investigators refused to answer. Instead they asked Vengalattore to take a blank December 2010 calendar and mark off for them the days he had been in town. (See id . ¶¶ 438-439.)

As described in Part I.C.2. below, the investigators’ eventual written report to the Dean, while recommending that Vengalattore not be found to have raped Roe, stated their conclusion that Roe's allegation of their consensual sexual relationship was supported by a preponderance of the evidence. Without a hearing, Dean Ritter adopted the investigators’ report and found that Vengalattore had had an inappropriate sexual relationship with Roe; she also found that he had lied to the investigators. As a result, Dean Ritter imposed a two-week suspension without pay, which Vengalattore served in June 2017 after the denial of tenure had become final. His academic appointment employment at Cornell ended in June 2018.

"Cornell's decision to deny tenure is not at issue in this lawsuit" (Vengalattore brief on appeal at 13), that matter having been resolved by a 2018 ruling by the New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division, that "the sexual misconduct allegations raised by" Roe had "no[t] ... improperly influenced the tenure decision," and "that Cornell had not acted arbitrarily or capriciously during the tenure review process" (Complaint ¶¶ 645-646). Instead,...