Education |

DU law professor suing for pay equity bolstered by student support: “This shouldn’t be happening here”

Students at the University of Denver are rallying around law professor Rashmi Goel, who says the institution she’s taught at for 17 years has yet to rectify its actions following the unequal-pay lawsuit she filed in June.

Goel is now speaking out about the lawsuit, which she said she was initially hesitant to file because she believed her workplace would want to pay her fairly based on its commitment to teaching justice. In her lawsuit, Goel alleges she was the lowest-paid associate professor at DU’s Sturm College of Law, despite having taught there the longest.

“The university has a stated commitment to equality and fairness,” she said. “I hope it’ll get fixed.”

Since Goel filed her lawsuit, DU gave her a raise that the university said put her earnings higher than four associate professors in her department, according to court records. DU also said, in its response to the lawsuit, that Goel left money on the table by not pursuing a promotion to full professor.

DU law students started a petition they plan to give to Chancellor Jeremy Haefnerr asking him to immediately correct Goel’s salary and issue a public apology, said Emma Feeney, a third-year law student who took Goel’s criminal law course last year.

“Rashmi Goel is not just another law professor at Sturm, she is a bona fide presence,” Feeney wrote in a letter to Haeffner. “Professor Goel made the class extremely enjoyable through her animated, personal examples that always required ‘audience participation.’ Professor Goel has remained a presence in my law school life. Every time I go to the faculty offices to meet with another professor, I see her working, no matter how early or late it is… She simply goes above and beyond to embed herself in the community.”

The lawsuit, which claims DU’s law school paid Goel less based on her sex and race in violation of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, piggybacks off a 2013 suit filed by a group of female professors at Sturm who said they were being unequally paid.

The 2013 suit was settled for $2.7 million and promised transparent fixes so a similar situation wouldn’t happen again. The steps DU took to remedy the pay gap led Goel to notice her own wage discrepancy, which she said was $30,000 less than the average salary of her 11 associate professor colleagues.

Ariel DeFazio, Goel’s attorney, said she was not authorized to disclose Goel’s salary.

“I wasn’t anywhere near where I should be in comparison to my peers,” Goel said. “Having been there the longest of any associate professors, knowing very well I’m really respected and admired by students and faculty and have been a faithful and hardworking contributing member of the law school for 17 years, and then to find that none of that was reflected in my pay, was really disheartening and disappointing. This a law school. This shouldn’t be happening here.”

DU officials declined to comment Friday, citing the ongoing litigation.

In June, DU told The Denver Post the private school has been working closely with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “to ensure we meet the spirit and intent of the EEOC settlement we reached last year.”

In court documents filed this month, DU denied that its compensation system is discriminatory on the basis of gender, race or any other protected characteristic. The university claimed the pay discrepancy was based on reasons such as Goel’s performance and her decision to forego becoming a full professor, which would have increased her salary.

Additionally, DU said in court documents that because of the need for salary analysis spurred by the 2013 lawsuit, Goel received a pay raise that now made her earn more than four other associate professors — “three of whom are male and non-Asian.”

Goel confirmed receiving an “equity adjustment” in her pay starting Aug.1.

“That’s good,” Goel said. “But they assert that I am now higher paid than four of my colleagues in the same rank. I don’t know that because I don’t know anybody else’s equity adjustment. Other people could have gotten raises, too. I do know that I’m still the longest-standing tenured associate professor, so it shouldn’t be four people underneath me. It should be many more people. This lack of consistency of understandable measures or computation for all of this is a big part of the problem. As someone who does a lot of work in gender and race, this just feels like a really old story, and it is really shocking and sad to see it at a law school.”

DeFazio noted that Goel can legally seek back pay for four years.

“Because the disparity is so huge, I can tell you that that money makes a difference,” Goel said.

A trial date is set for July 2020, but in the meantime, Goel plans on continuing doing the job she loves.

“I had to think after all this, what have I been doing this all for?” Goel said. “I do it because I love teaching. I believe in the power of the law to right things that are wrong to make a better world. I haven’t let it affect my commitment to the school and to my students and my colleagues because that’s not the kind of person I am. It’s not that I’m not mad and frustrated and feel devastated and taken advantage of, but I love what I do.”