A jury found in favor of Whittier College in a long-running whistleblower lawsuit brought by a former professor who alleged she was wrongfully fired for supporting students claiming they were sexually harassed by another professor who headed the plaintiff’s department.
On Friday, the Los Angeles Superior Court jury found that although plaintiff Teresa Delfin indeed supported one of the students, identified only as Jane Doe 3, in an investigation of Professor David Iyam and advocated to protect students from his alleged sexual harassment, her actions were not a “substantial factor” in the college’s decision to not renew the anthropology lecturer’s contract.
Attorneys for the college maintained Jane Doe 3 reported the professor’s alleged misconduct, not Delfin, and the plaintiff improved her career by getting hired at Cal Poly Pomona.
In her suit filed in May 2019, Delfin contended that despite the student complaints about Iyam, the college promoted him to full professor in 2014 before it allowed him to resign in 2016.
“Instead of protecting its students and staff, the leaders at Whittier College chose to protect Professor Iyam by allowing him free rein to continue sexually harassing, assaulting, and battering whomever he pleased by ratifying his conduct again and again,” according to the court papers of four former students who filed a separate case against Iyam and reached a settlement in 2023.
As one of Whittier College’s few Black professors and a well-published...
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