Over five years have passed since a student in UCLA business school professor Gordon Klein’s Spring 2020 Principles of Taxation course emailed him “An Appeal on Behalf of Black Bruins” requesting that leniency in course grading be applied—but only to his Black classmates—due to the social climate following the George Floyd killing in Minnesota.
That email, and Prof. Klein’s reply declining to engage in race-based preferential treatment of a subset of students, precipitated a series of administrative and social media actions against him. Legal Insurrection has covered the events and eventual lawsuit by Prof. Klein since inception.
After Prof. Klein’s private email was posted on social media prompting a targeted campaign against him, UCLA kowtowed to the online mob and immediately placed Prof. Klein on administrative leave and banished him from campus. Though his employment was later reinstated, UCLA’s disciplinary treatment of Prof. Klein and public condemnation of his character resulted in threats of physical violence against him and his family, emotional turmoil, as well as substantial economic losses arising, most notably, from the abrupt end to his longstanding collateral business as an expert witness. In his lawsuit against the UC Regents and the Dean of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Prof. Klein seeks $22 million in damages.
Trial began on Tuesday, July 1, before California Superior Court Judge H. Jay Ford, III. I attended the trial days held that week.
In attendance in the Santa Monica courtroom was a small gallery of observers, comprised mostly of Prof. Klein supporters and plaintiffs in other lawsuits against the UC and other universities, as well as one of the named defendants, Dean Antonio Bernardo.
Prof. Klein was called as the first witness. He began his testimony by detailing his 44-year history of teaching over 25,000 students at UCLA, primarily in the MBA program, during which time he has never been disciplined, his employment has been consistently renewed, and he has received merit-based raises in all but two evaluation periods.
The bulk of the evidence presented through Prof. Klein’s testimony was a compilation of letters beginning with the June 2, 2020 student email, which snowballed into this $22 million fiasco. Prof. Klein said he found the student’s emailed request for preferential treatment of his Black classmates “outrageous, unlawful, and unbelievably immoral.”
Prof. Klein explained that he graded the course on a curve such that boosting grades for Black students would necessarily result in lowering grades for non-Black students, constituting illegal race-based discrimination. Prof. Klein further opined that even if he were to grant the student’s request to exercise leniency in favor only of Black students, he would face challenges in identifying which students were Black since the course was conducted solely online via prerecorded videos of the professor’s lectures.
Within 20 minutes of receiving the email, Prof. Klein authored a reply structured as a series of questions in order to challenge the student’s thought process. He maintained that, as a seasoned educator, it is in his nature to pose questions to students to provoke critical thinking and promote learning and that he did not intend to “mock, humiliate, or insult” the student. Ultimately, Prof. Klein’s reply prompted an immediate heartfelt apology from the student. Thereafter, Prof. Klein considered the matter resolved.
Prof. Klein went on to provide the timeline of Dean Bernardo’s alleged retaliatory actions against him after learning of the emailed reply. Notably, on the same day as the triggering email exchange, Prof. Klein testified the dean referred Prof. Klein to UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office and, on the following day, he put him on administrative leave and banned him from campus. Prof. Klein further testified that on the third day, Dean Bernardo emailed the entirety of the Anderson Community—a body Prof. Klein estimates at no less than 42,000 recipients, the number of Anderson alumni alone—condemning Prof. Klein’s “troubling conduct” as an “abuse of power” that threatened safety and was contrary to the institution’s “core principles,” and informing that Prof. Klein had been placed on leave and that the remainder of his course had been reassigned to another professor.
Prof. Klein testified that shortly after dissemination of the Dean’s mass email, he received death threats and vandalism to his home, which he reported to the police, the FBI, as well as Dean Bernardo. Additionally, he began receiving multiple media inquiries about the controversy. It was then, he said, that he decided to appear on Fox News’s Laura Ingraham’s show to tell his side of the story.
Prof. Klein stated that, on June 21, 2020, he received an email from Dean Bernardo notifying him of his immediate reinstatement and that the news brought “joy to my heart.” However, Prof. Klein testified the joy was quickly replaced with shock when an hour and a half later he received another email from Dean Bernardo, blasted again to the whole Anderson Community, disparaging him and referring to an “ongoing process” against him, seemingly in contradiction to his contemporaneous reinstatement.
The last topic of Prof. Klein’s testimony for the day focused on a Twitter posting (i.e. “tweet”) by another student later the same day the email with the complaining student was publicized. Prof. Klein testified that the tweet was made by a former student of his from a different course that same quarter. She, along with four others from her sorority, had developed a rapport with Prof. Klein and the group of five students shared an inside joke with him whereby they would refer to him as their favorite professor and, in turn, he called them his favorite students. The group engaged in a number of emails back and forth, including some that were more casual in tone referring to lunch and dinner plans. In one email, the student requested that Prof. Klein bump up the A minus grade she earned in his course. After he denied her request, seemingly in retaliation, she posted to Twitter an edited portion of a March 14 email in which Prof. Klein called the group of five his “favorite” students culminating in a winking emoji.
Prof. Klein testified that although he was told that UCLA never formally investigated that student’s tweet, he was called in to discuss it with Title IX Coordinator. Without detailing discussion of the tweet itself, Prof. Klein testified that during the meeting, the Coordinator commented that he had experienced racial discrimination as a Black man. In a demonstration of empathy, Klein acknowledged the commonly reported example of discrimination described as “driving while Black,” which appeared to upset the Coordinator.
Trial resumed on July 2 with the continuation of Klein’s testimony on the issue of economic damages.
Prof. Klein detailed his lucrative, 17-year side career as an expert witness in complex and high-profile corporate litigation and how his multi-million-dollar business effectively dried up due to the damage to his reputation by UCLA’s alleged actions and public defamation. Prof. Klein further described the emotional distress and physiological effects he suffered on account of the public backlash for which he was prescribed medication for anxiety.
Cross examination by counsel for UCLA, Sandy McDonough, followed. In an attempt to impeach his credibility as to the tone of his emailed reply to the student, she confronted Prof. Klein with an email he had written in response to an unknown “well-wisher” only 12 hours after receiving the initial email from the student seeking racial favoritism, in which he remarked, “so I teased him for his silliness.” Prof. Klein explained that his use of the word “tease” meant ‘to understand the meaning of something,’ as in “tease out,” not as in poking fun.
In addressing the tweet mentioned above, McDonough presented Prof. Klein with that student’s accompanying comment that “Professor Klein has a history of sending considerably inappropriate emails.” She then showed the court emails in which Prof. Klein described students who are part of the previously mentioned group of five “favorites” as “delightful” and “sweet.” In another email Klein wrote, “Looking forward to seeing you and your morning bodyguards soon.” He explained that he was referring to the same group because they always sat in his class together in a squad. McDonough presented a final email wherein Klein responded to a student for whom he had provided career and personal advice that, in addition to career updates, she could update him on “juicy gossip from your housemates.” He explained that this student often confided in Klein about her life, including sharing stories about her sorority friends. McDonough disclosed that some of the recipients of these emails initiated a Title IX complaint.
Trial is scheduled to resume on Tuesday, July 8 with the continuation of the cross-examination of Professor Klein.
