Volume CXXXIII, Number 18 March 1, 2002 f

College cleared of liability in lawsuit
JAMES FISHER
ORIENT STAFF

A Bowdoin student who sued the College for breach of contract over a 1999 Judicial Board hearing heard a Portland jury find against him last Friday on most of the claims in his lawsuit. He was awarded no compensation or damages.

After deliberating for over five hours, the jury retuned a verdict that Bowdoin Director of Communications Scott Hood said was "an affirmation of the College's judicial process." They found that the College did not breach its contract with George Goodman '00 in conducting disciplinary proceedings against him for a March 1999 fight with Namsoo Lee '01, then a campus shuttle driver. Those proceedings led to Goodman's expulsion in May 1999.

The jury also found that Deans Mya Mangawang and Craig Bradley did not "tortiously interfere" with the contract between Goodman and the College as expressed in the student handbook.

The jury's verdict was mixed on Goodman's claim that both Lee and the College's administrators were negligent. They found that Lee was negligent in his role as a College employee, but that Lee's negligence caused no damages to Goodman. The jury completely cleared the administration of negligence in conducting the J-Board hearing and expelling Goodman.

The verdict leaves Goodman with little to show for his three-year legal battle. "We just don't know at this point," said Goodman's counsel and mother, Collette Goodman, when asked about plans to appeal.

From the beginning of their legal maneuvering, the two sides saw the 1999 altercation and the disciplinary procedures that followed it in very different ways, contesting basic facts and statements. Goodman's original complaint, filed in May of 2000, described the late-night incident on College Street in terms of Lee's aggression. Goodman, who acknowledged throwing a snowball at the van Lee was driving, alleged that Lee stepped out of the shuttle, "grabbed Goodman from behind, spun him around with such force that Goodman's jacket ripped from the neck opening to the waist, and then hit Mr. Goodman in the face."

Lee described the incident differently. "It was not a fight," he said this week. "It was an attack. George Goodman attacked me." The J-Board agreed with him, and after an April 1999 hearing decided that Goodman alone was responsible for the altercation, which left Lee with a broken nose and Goodman with an injured hand.

In his suit, Goodman called the disciplinary hearings "unfair, racist, and discriminatory," arguing that in its drive to promote ethnic diversity on campus, the administration favored Lee, who is Korean, because of his race, and that Lee and Director of Residential Life Robert Graves focused on race at the hearing. Goodman's complaint contains excerpts of the transcript of the J-Board hearing, including a section in which Lee said "I even thought about, um, oh, he's being racist or something like that… I didn't know if he was being racist."

"The College has contended from day one that race was not a factor," Hood said. The judge presiding over the lawsuit, Gene Carter, issued a directed verdict during the trial dismissing Goodman's civil rights claims, saying that no jury could find "direct or circumstantial evidence of racial animus" in the College's conduct. As a result, the jury did not deliberate any charges of racial discrimination. Lee said that "the race issue never came up during the J-Board process."

Goodman also argued that the college violated its contract with him as described in the Social Code and the student handbook. In a motion to dismiss the suit filed by Bowdoin in July 2000, soon after Goodman's complaint, the College argued that the student handbook was not a legally binding contract capable of being breached, but an informal guide to Bowdoin's policies. "Even if it were a contract," they wrote, "which it is not, Bowdoin did not act arbitrarily or capriciously in dismissing plaintiff."

According to the motion to dismiss, the J-Board's decision was based on inconsistencies in Goodman's testimony, "the severity of the beating by plaintiff of Mr. Lee," and an unspecified previous disciplinary record on Goodman. "This was a case of unacceptable violent behavior," Hood said. "The process works."

Bradley, the Dean of Student Affairs, also described the jury's verdict as a vindication for the College's disciplinary procedures. "Obviously, it would have been a lot more convenient for us to settle the case," he said. "But for us there's a principle at stake." He said that the lawsuit has not prompted the J-Board to revise its procedures.

"I still believe in a person's right to sue us, and the right to appeal our decisions," Bradley said.