Lehigh University student got a C+ and now seeks $1.3 million in lawsuit

This is just pathetic - Lehigh University student got a C+ and now seeks $1.3 million in lawsuit - Yahoo! News

 

You know, although "losing a job" is sometimes part of life, we don't reflexively think "pathetic" just because someone files a suit for wrongful termination. Sometimes termination is wrongful in a way that the law has remedies for. The student here just might have a similar case. Or not. Now the trial court, with fuller information that we have, gets its chance to consider. I'm okay with this.

 

What a vicious global judgment to make about someone you've just met through a 547-word story about one disagreement she's party to.

Okay, here's every single even potentially unflattering thing I think the story says about her:

But if you read just two more sentences in to the same article – and you're paying attention to what you're reading, rather than any anger the lede has stirred – you'll see that "because she is unhappy" is a ridiculous spin on the suit that says a lot about the Daily Caller and nothing about the subject:

Okay, what else do we learn about Thode that could possibly deserve the flame?

I don't know how they do things at Lehigh, but I've read a number of grading rubrics. And it seems entirely possible that giving a zero for "classroom participation" to someone who did participate in class – and from context, in the rest of her academic record, doesn't seem to have scored badly at all in her academic work, social skills in the academic context, etc. – just might run against, for starters, the school's own policy.

Again, the Caller destroys its own screaming lede that the $1.3 million claim is "because she is unhappy."

And I'm not a lawyer, etc., but doesn't this sound reasonably consistent with the way damages are calculated when it's asserted the tort was the proximate cause of a loss of income?

Does her father's benefit package have anything to do with this merits of her case?

Oh, well then! I'm sure no good counselor in a discussion with their colleagues has ever either used a profanity (unidentified, "on at least one occasion"), or cried (on one). I'm sure the Lehigh counseling faculty would agree on cross-examination that none of them have, nor any other student they've passed along on the track to counseling licensure.

So she tried to resolve the disagreement without a lawsuit.

 

After reading the article, the good thing that she did not get a job as she ever wanted.

 

She tried to resolve it by showing up with her father? Conflict of interest there as he is employed by the school not to mention she's an adult. Unfortunately we do not know all the facts (was there actually any discrimination?) but only what the media tells us - which, more often than not, simply is there to infuriate and get people hot under the collar without knowing the facts.

Let the Court decide, after all, they will be privy to the information the media left out and only touched in generalities.

 

Why, Tekman?

Is it because she used a profanity once and cried once? This probably happened in a class or classes about issues in counseling. If you're a HUMAN BEING you can't tell me that something that came up in such a class might not bring you to tears, or to one word considered profane, one time each.

Is it because, believing she had a case that she'd been railroaded out of a professional training program with "breach of contract and sexual discrimination," she sued for lost wages and it's now reached trial?

Hey: on the merits of the case, the university might win.

But the student should be able to make her case too without being pinned with a scarlet letter. Without being told by someone else here – not you, Tek – that the poster is glad HE doesn't have cancer and isn't a slave. oh, and her father has a good employment benefit – so SHE should, presumably, drop her case for breach of contract and sex discrimination because these things aren't that bad.

 

I imagine it's common for a student to bring an advocate – could be a lawyer, could be a family member, could perhaps be a friend – to dispute-resolution meetings like this. If her natural advocate who understood the academic world were her sister, it would probably be her sister. The university will certainly have multiple people there or that it can call on. A faculty member individually might have an advocate, perhaps from the faculty association.

Because in the present case, Ms. Thode's natural advocate is her dad, the story's pushed further into a narrative about entitled young adults. But she can't choose her parents. Would we prefer if she lawyered up early? Or if she brought her brother, who I'm making up here, a plumber with no experience with college? Would that be more fair – at a meeting with her university with a billion dollar endowment?

Now, her father did have another relationship with the university, as a member of the faculty teaching finance. But how many finance faculty at large universities have any formal sway, or even informal sway to speak of, with graduate departments of counseling? In this case it sure isn't looking like like he had much.

+1.

 

Like many parents – certainly not all – hers found a way to cover her college and graduate school tuition. I'm one of the house liberals here, and I don't resent this intergenerational transfer of wealth at all. You seem to.

• Red card for calling it a "free ride," though. For all we know she had to work for living expenses, books and supplementals. I think these are basically never included in free-tuition-for-faculty's-kids deals.

• Yellow card for saying she's had a "successful life course… handed to her on a silver platter." What the heck do you know about her relative advantage in life except that her father had a benefit that covered her tuition?

• Yellow card at least for saying "she's not happy about it" in direct reference to her father's benefit. No, what she probably isn't happy about is the situation underlying the suit. The claim in the suit is for breach of contract and sex discrimination.

• General comment: She isn't asking you to "feel her pain." She's asking the Court for a decision on the merits of the case.

Personally, I'd been expecting that you wouldn't launch a tirade implying she should be happy she didn't have cancer growing and wasn't a slave. Was I expecting too much?

Anyway, for a thoughtful critic of how facts are "misconstrued, whether by intent, laziness or unconscious bias on the part of the writer" one paragraph before the one I quoted... well, you've followed that up with good examples.

This might be a good point. Perhaps it's based on the difference between representative pay for a licensed professional counselor and representative pay for an unlicensed master's-level human service worker. Perhaps the claim is badly set. I don't know.

You make a good point.

I think this a straw man that no one proposes or wants.

You make a good point. Maybe they didn't allow a retake. Here too, the Court should know more.

 

The court should ask her to pay back the tuition like all of us did. Teacher's decision is final.

The government should stop entitlements. She thinks everyone will bow in front of her and giver her things for free. She should be jailed for using profanity in class first.

 

Because she got full ride both college degrees, no need to pay back student loans likes most of the American graduates are currently struggle with. But now she wants more from the school for $1.3 million; I believe that worth 20 years of a counseling job salary.

 

I love this part of the article:

"Orloski has also alleged that Carr and Nicholas Ladany (who was the director of the degree program) conspired against Thode because she and three other students were critical when they were had to search for supplemental internships midway through a semester."

I makes me wonder if Megan was schizophrenic; paranoia is a symptom, you know. LOL... What a joke!!!

 

So when an attorney seems to propose that a large university in Pennsylvania retaliated against internal criticism, you joke that their client might have a serious mental illness and you laugh.

Well, good to know nothing like that would ever happen.

 

Give her the 1.3M and take back the degrees. Let her start over someplace else.

 

I guess I must be missing something here because I just don't get how a C in a class will absolutely stop you from becoming a counselor. Fight the grade within the college if you really feel it's unfair, but to go to trial over a C? I don't know. Where did the sex discrimination come in? I guess I need a nap cause I just don't get it.