Illinois District Court Refuses To Certify Class Based On Anti-harassment Policy

Most employers today have anti-harassment policies covering race, gender and other types of discrimination to help comply with state and federal antidiscrimination legislation and to take advantage of the affirmative defense described in Faragher v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775 (1998) and Burlington Industries, Inc. v. Ellerth, 524 U.S. 742 (1998). But what happens when employees are dissatisfied with the results of the investigations undertaken pursuant to those policies? That was the question answered by the court in Brown v. The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, Case No. 2:19-cv-02020 (C.D. Ill., Dec. 9, 2022).

In Brown, the three plaintiffs were Black employees who worked at the University of Illinois' Urbana-Champaign campus. They brought a class action against the school under Title VII based on the inadequacy of its investigations of complaints of race discrimination. They argued that the school's Office of Access and Equity, which