Opinion ID: 439066
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Faculty and NTP Placement at Hire

Text: 25 In support of their claim of discrimination in the placement of faculty at hire, plaintiffs offered a statistical study that evaluated such placement on a university-wide basis as though Stony Brook hired male and female academics in groups and then assigned them to various positions throughout the university. This is a major flaw since, as Judge Pratt found, the University hires academics on an individual basis to fill specific teaching positions with particularized job requirements as they become open. The studies also did not consider prior academic rank or work experience in comparing the placement of male and female academics. Judge Pratt correctly held that prior rank and experience themselves may reflect academic merit and that universities may consider them as one of the many factors that govern faculty appointment decisions. 26 Plaintiffs' statistical evidence of discrimination in the initial placement of female NTP's purported to show that women were disproportionately hired into lower-ranking NTP positions. These studies were also flawed since they did not take availability pools for each position into account and thus assumed that all NTP's at Stony Brook were available to be hired into each NTP job at every level. Since there are a wide variety of discrete NTP positions at Stony Brook and some of those positions require considerable specialization, plaintiffs' assumption was inconsistent with the record and their study was not probative of discrimination. Moreover, the defendants' data demonstrated that more than the statistically expected number of women had been hired in each NTP rank when availability pools were taken into account. 27