[G]oddard College’s former chief academic officer is suing the school, alleging that he was discriminated against for being African-American and wrongfully fired.
Lewis Jones started working at Goddard College in September 2015. He alleges in a suit filed in court in Washington County this summer that the school fired him in February 2018 despite a positive performance review and without explaining why.
According to Jones’s seven-page complaint, then-Goddard president Robert Kenny inexplicably put him on a performance improvement plan despite a positive prior performance review. When Jones objected, Kenny said nothing and then fired Jones a month later, the suit alleges.
“No Caucasian senior administrator with satisfactory review scores was dismissed,” states the complaint. Jones is represented by Woodstock attorney Norman Watts.
The suit was first reported by the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus.
In subjecting Jones to a performance improvement plan and in ultimately firing him, the school broke its own policies and violated the Vermont Fair Employment Practices Act, the suit alleges. Jones is seeking damages in the form of lost wages and benefits as well as attorney’s fees and punitive damages.
Goddard denied most of Jones’s claims in court filings, claiming that Jones refused to take part in the performance evaluation process and was unwilling to say how he might improve when asked by supervisor.
“Kenny requested that Jones submit, in writing, tangible steps that Jones could take to improve in areas where Jones’ scores fell below the satisfactory level in his performance evaluation. Jones, however, never responded or complied with Kenny’s request,” the school’s lawyers wrote in court filings.
The suit comes at a time when the college is under significant pressures. Its accreditor, the New England Commission of Higher Education, put the school on probation earlier this month because of concerns over its ailing finances and turnover in its upper ranks.
Jones came to Goddard from Bluefield State College in West Virginia. His tenure there was troubled, and the faculty senate there took a vote of no confidence in the administrator.
News accounts from West Virginia said faculty members alleged “coercive” behavior, including threats to dismiss them without cause. Jones also faced allegations that he promoted policies that contradicted the college president’s own rules and that he “unlawfully” upended the university’s “core academic structure.” Jones was quoted saying charges against him were baseless and the result of “pernicious politics.”
