Court Opinion

ID: 9474046
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 04:46:23.788402+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:43:52.431599
License: Public Domain

CAMPBELL, Chief Judge
(concurring).
I reach the same result as Judge Wyzan-ski. However, I do not agree that the district court’s review was limited to the Chancellor’s May 14, 1976 denial of tenure; accordingly, I find it necessary to evaluate the University’s actions up to and through the Chancellor’s July 31, 1979 decision. In addition, while I agree with much of Judge Wyzanski’s discussion, I see some matters in somewhat different perspective, and therefore comment separately.
As is often true of close tenure decisions, the facts of this case evoke considerable sympathy for the rejected applicant. Be*12cause Dr. Kumar’s tenure application was supported by many of his colleagues, arguments can be made, and were made, in favor of granting him tenure.
But the district court’s authority to reverse the University’s decision was limited to the question of whether or not that decision was infected by discrimination based on race or national origin. Neither the district court nor this court is empowered to sit as a super tenure board. I believe that courts must be extremely wary of intruding into the world of university tenure decisions. These decisions necessarily hinge on subjective judgements regarding the applicant’s academic excellence, teaching ability, creativity, contributions to the university community, rapport with students and colleagues, and other factors that are not susceptible of quantitative measurement. Absent discrimination, a university must be given a free hand in making such tenure decisions. Where, as here, the university’s judgment is supportable and the evidence of discrimination negligible, a federal court should not substitute its judgment for that of the university.
Like Judge Wyzanski, I find much evidence supporting Chancellor Bromery’s July 31, 1979 letter to President Knapp denying tenure; certainly a reasonable person could have reached the same conclusion as did the Chancellor on the basis of the evidence properly before the Chancellor. I cannot find sufficient evidence in this record for the district court to have concluded, as it did, that Chancellor Bromery’s stated reasons for denying tenure were a pretext for discrimination. Rather, I am constrained to believe that understandable sympathy for Dr. Kumar,- and lack of sympathy for the outcome of the tenure proceedings, led the district court to infer discrimination without any sufficient basis for doing so.
It is true, as we recognized in Sweeney v. Board of Trustees of Keene State College, 604 F.2d 106, 109 n. 2 (1st Cir.1979), that “smoking gun” evidence is hard to come by in a discrimination case. The district judge must have .leeway to react to nuances and draw inferences from his observations of the witnesses. But there also has to be a limit to reliance on pure atmospherics. We require, and are expected to require, evidence of discrimination that “stands up in a court of law.” Otherwise, a minority applicant who is denied tenure will not merely be as well off as others; he will receive the advantage of a second tenure determination, this time by a judge or a judge and jury. A court cannot simply speculate that a plaintiff may have been denied tenure for reasons of race or nationality, any more than a policeman’s hunch can substitute for evidence of “probable cause” to arrest a suspect. Universities have a right to exercise independent judgment in choosing faculty so long as they do not discriminate. Inevitably, some tenure decisions, like the present one, will be very close — may, indeed, split the university community and lead responsible people to very different conclusions on the merits. Courts have no license to resolve such disputes except where there is evidence from which to conclude that an illicit motive was at work. The fact that a court might be sympathetic to a tenure award is not enough from which to find discrimination unless the University’s stated reasons are palpably unworthy of credence or there is other evidence pointing to discrimination.
Here, while the case on the merits of whether or not to grant tenure was controversial and perhaps close, there was clearly a supportable judgment. The very slight direct evidence of discriminatory animus in the university community as a whole (notably, the racial slurs overheard .from a few students who may have been among those providing the low teaching assessment in the Wolf report) is attenuated and unconnected to those who made the ultimate decision. On such a record, I believe the district court was clearly erroneous in finding that Dr. Kumar was denied tenure for reasons of his race or national origin.
I. Scope of Review
Before proceeding to the merits, I must explain my disagreement with Judge Wy-zanski concerning the scope of our review. *13I do not agree that only the May 14, 1976 order of the Chancellor should have been reviewed by the district court, or may now be reviewed on appeal.
While Kumar’s complaint was filed on June 5, 1978, slightly over a year before Chancellor Bromery’s “final” decision of July 31, 1979, the trial occurred in January of 1983 and took full account of the 1979 determination. Had plaintiff amended his complaint to seek review of the later University proceedings, the point Judge Wy-zanski now makes would have been laid to rest. But lack of an amendment is not fatal. Under Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(b), issues not raised by the pleadings may be tried by express or implied consent of the parties. That is exactly what occurred with respect to the issue of whether the University’s conduct from May 14, 1976 through July 31, 1979 was discriminatory. Not only did the parties by their acquiescence implicitly consent to trying this issue, the district court stated in its opinion that it regarded Bromery’s 1979 “decision-making” as the pivotal issue for its review. No objection was taken to the court’s pronouncement, and neither side has challenged it on appeal.
In these circumstances, the question Judge Wyzanski raises can be brought up sua sponte now only if it involves non-waivable, jurisdictional concerns. But a party’s failure to file with the E.E.O.C. is not a jurisdictional prerequisite to suit in a federal court. See Zipes v. Trans World Airlines, 455 U.S. 385, 102 S.Ct. 1127, 71 L.Ed.2d 234 (1982); Reynolds v. Sheet Metal Workers, Local 102, 702 F.2d 221, 224 (D.C.Cir.1981). Like the statute of limitations, non-compliance with E.E.O.C. filing requirements is waived if not filed as an affirmative defense. Hence, we need not decide the extent to which incidents occurring after the filing of an E.E.O.C. complaint may be raised, over objection, in a court proceeding stemming from the original complaint. See e.g., Oubichon v. North American Rockwell Corp., 482 F.2d 569, 571 (9th Cir.1973); Weise v. Syracuse University, 522 F.2d 397, 412 (2nd Cir.1975). But see Moore v. Sunbeam Corp., 459 F.2d 811 (7th Cir.1972), and cases cited in Schlei and Grossman, Employment Discrimination Law (1976), p. 995 n. 92. The failure to place the University’s post-1976 conduct before the E.E.O.C. was not raised as a defense, was not the subject of any kind of objection below, and is not now an issue that we may consider sua sponte on appeal.
Our review of the district court’s judgment, therefore, should embrace the same time-frame considered by the district court, namely, up to and including Chancellor Bromery’s letter to President Knapp dated July 31, 1979. I agree with the district court that it was Bromery’s “decision at that time which ultimately terminated substantive decision-making in Kumar’s tenure case.” While earlier actions by others also deserve consideration, the paramount question is whether or not Bromery would have recommended tenure had it not been for Kumar’s race and national origin.1
II. The Merits of the District Court’s Finding of Discrimination
I agree with the district court that a prima facie case as defined in Banerjee v. Board of Trustees of Smith College, 648 F.2d 61 (1st Cir.), cert. denied, 454 U.S. 1098, 102 S.Ct. 671, 70 L.Ed.2d 639 (1981) was made out, requiring the defendant University, as it did, to “articulate” its reasons for denying tenure to Dr. Kumar. See note 1, supra. As the court recognized, however, once the employer gave its reasons, the presumption implied by the prima *14facie case disappeared. Texas Department of Community Affairs v. Burdine, 450 U.S. 248, 253, 101 S.Ct. 1089, 1093, 67 L.Ed.2d 207 (1981). Thereafter, the plaintiff carried the burden of proving that he was denied tenure for a discriminatory reason. The evidence constituting the Ban-erjee prima facie case was of little or no assistance in this regard, see 450 U.S. at 255, note 10, 101 S.Ct. at 1095, note 10, since to make out such a case plaintiff had only to show,
“that his qualifications were at least sufficient to place him in the middle group of tenure candidates as to whom a decision granting tenure and a decision denying tenure could be justified as a reasonable exercise of discretion____”
648 F.2d at 63. Thus it remained for plaintiff to prove that he was qualified in the sense that, absent discrimination, he would likely have received tenure.
Here, in finding the plaintiff had proven actual discrimination, the court relied essentially on two types of evidence. First, it found Chancellor Bromery’s stated reasons for denying tenure to be lacking in credibility and therefore “pretextual”. Where an employer’s “proffered explanation is unworthy of credence,” Burdine, 450 U.S. at 256, 101 S.Ct. at 1095, it may create an inference of discrimination. Id.
Second, the court referred to several specific matters from which it implied discrimination: (1) the granting of tenure to a Professor Whiston, a Caucasian, whose qualifications in the court’s view were comparable to Kumar’s, suggesting unequal treatment of Kumar; (2) the so-called Wolf Report, reflecting a poor teaching evaluation by students, a few of whom may have been the same people overheard by Dean Odiorne making racist remarks concerning Dr. Kumar; (3) various supposed procedural defects in Kumar’s tenure review (including the fact that, at some moments, favorable parts of his tenure file had been found by Kumar to be detached and missing).
I shall discuss each of these in turn.
A. Whether Chancellor Bromery’s Stated Reasons Were So Weak or Implausible as to Create an Inference of Discrimination
This is not the first time this court has been faced with the question of determining whether an employer’s reason for discharging or promoting someone was affected by a “good” reason (i.e., legal business motive) or a “bad” one. As Judge Aldrich wrote in NLRB v. Eastern Smelting & Refining Corp., 598 F.2d 666, 670-71 (1st Cir.1979),
“If an employer asserts an obviously weak or implausible good reason, or one manifestly unequally applied, this may support an inference that there was a bad reason [i.e., to discharge an employee]. But where the burden is on the [National Labor Relations] Board, except in such clear cases the mere fact that the Board considers the asserted good reason less than compelling will not suffice ____ As we have frequently said, the Board may not set up its own business standards and then condemn the employer for not following them. Unfortunately ... the Board all too often has ... labeled the good reason pretextual, although it was apparent that it was a good reason of substance.”
In a similar vein, we had criticized “the incantation of the rubric that the Company’s reasons for the discharge were ‘pre-textual’,” condemning an administrative law judge for basing his conclusion on a “selective reading of'the record.” Liberty Mutual Insurance Co. v. NLRB, 592 F.2d 595, 603 (1st Cir.1979). We went on to say,
“The Board denigrates the Company’s business justifications for the dis-charge____ As we have emphasized in our past decisions, it is neither the Board’s function, nor indeed ours, to second-guess business decisions. ‘ “The Act was not intended to guarantee that business decision be sound, only that they not be the product of antiunion motiva-tion____” ’” (citing cases).
I cite these cases, although they involve discharges in a labor setting, because the *15analysis is equally cogent here. Here, as there, while an inference of discriminatory animus may properly be drawn from an “obviously weak or implausible good reason, or one manifestly unequally applied”, 598 F.2d at 670, a tribunal “may not set up its own business standards and then condemn the employer for not following them.” Nor do supportable reasons given by a university for refusing tenure become “pretextual” merely because the court disagrees and so labels them.
Indeed, in a university setting, especially where questions of faculty tenure are involved, a court’s duty to refrain from inadvertently setting up its own standard is, if anything, greater than the duty of the labor board not to impose its own business standards on the ordinary business employer:
“Academic freedom, although not a specifically enumerated constitutional right, long has been viewed as a special concern of the First Amendment.”
Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 312, 98 S.Ct. 2733, 2759, 57 L.Ed.2d 750 (1978). Moreover, tenure decisions are by their nature judgmental and subjective. In close cases reasonable people can differ. It is the choice of the university, however, not of the court, that is called for in a faculty member’s contract.
In the present case, I think it is as clear as can be that Chancellor Bromery’s evaluation of Kumar did not involve reasoning that may be termed “obviously weak or implausible,” nor was there evidence sufficient to show that it was “manifestly unequally applied”, 598 F.2d at 670. I think the district court made the error of finding Bromery’s reasons “pretextual” simply because it became convinced by plaintiff’s evidence that the Chancellor’s reasons were “less than compelling”. Id. But as we pointed out in Liberty Mutual, “the Act was not intended to guarantee that business decisions be sound, only that they not be the product of [illegal] motivation.” 592 F.2d at 603.
Both as to service and teaching, there was ample evidence supportive of Brom-ery’s position. Even assuming the court was satisfied that the better-reasoned position lay elsewhere, and that position favored Kumar, this did not warrant a finding that Bromery’s reasons were insincere and hence a “pretext” on Bromery’s part. A pretext is “a purpose or motive alleged or an appearance assumed in order to cloak the real intention or state of affairs.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1971). People can have vastly different views with utter sincerity. If a university’s decision-making process is to stand up, its decisions cannot be overridden any time a court, after reviewing the evidence, thinks it wrong. Disingenuousness on the part of the second highest-ranking officer of a major university cannot be inferred merely because there are others on the campus with strongly-held different views.
In his letter of July 31, 1979 to the President of the University, Chancellor Bromery concluded that the file as amended (and, expressly, without consideration of the so-called “Wolf Report” and Professor Hartzler’s letter) did not contain the requisite convincing evidence of excellence in at least two, and of strength in the third, of the areas considered relevant in tenure decisions. Specifically, Bromery found (a) “evidence of strength” in one area, research, creative and professional activity; (b) “possible strength” in a second area, service, but (c) “no strength” in the third, teaching.
In holding these conclusions pretextual, the court stated that Kumar was “excellent” in research and scholarship (the area in which Bromery conceded at least “strength”), and then went on to substitute its own findings that Kumar’s service was “excellent” and his teaching (where Brom-ery found “no strength”) “excellent” or at least strong.
These latter findings, in my opinion, constitute an imposition by the court of its own tenure standards for those of the constituted authorities. It is not a court’s *16prerogative to pick and choose among the evidence and, on the basis of its own choice, to reject the Chancellor’s. The court was limited to determining whether the Chancellor’s evaluation of Kumar was so lacking in any kind of support as to give rise to an inference of bad faith. Nothing like that was established.
1. Service
Looking first at service, I do not see how the court could find that a reasonable university had no choice but to hold that Ku-mar’s service was “excellent”. The concept of “service”, first of all, is an amorphous one which must be judged comparatively, based on one’s experience and sense of what others, similarly situated, have done. A number of educators besides Bromery, including Acting Provost Alfange and Vice Chancellor Puryear, shared in Bromery’s modest evaluation of Kumar’s service. Kumar’s service consisted mainly of administration of certain masters’ degree candidates. It also included refereeing articles for scholarly journals, a function which Bromery felt should count mainly as research, not service. Dean Odiorne, Dean of the School of Business Administration and a Kumar supporter, was lukewarm about Kumar’s service in his letter of April 23, 1976. He stated that his “service is adequate in the context of his program direction of an important MS degree, but not outstanding.” (This should be compared with the Dean’s enthusiastic review of the service of another tenure candidate, Whiston, whose varied services on committees, publications, etc., took him a paragraph to list. It should be noted, however, that Kumar’s referee work was omitted at this stage.) In the initial application, comments on service from the personnel committee of Kumar’s department were limited to statements that Kumar “participates actively in the affairs of the department”, and from the personnel committee of the Business School, that “[h]e has carried his proportionate share of service within the University.” Professor Sufrin, a member of Kumar’s department and former department chairman who vacillated on the issue of tenure, at one point evaluated Kumar’s service to his profession and to the school as “moderately low.”
There were, to be sure, other far more enthusiastic ratings and some appealing arguments on Kumar’s behalf. Dr. Kumar said he was never asked to do more, and there was evidence that the department did not necessarily demand or expect more from young faculty at the time.
The court credited the glowing evaluations of Kumar’s service from his supporters, and rejected all others. However, peer judgment is only one aspect of the tenure process at the University. Approval is also required at the Provost and Chancellor levels by administrators who have the benefit of seeing the levels of performance in other departments and schools. The University could believe that departmental colleagues would have a narrower, more parochial view. People like Bromery, who testified to reviewing as many as 100 tenure files a year, appraised Kumar’s service as ordinary, and I do not see how this can be swept aside as lacking in credit-worthiness.
I do not mean to say that a different Chancellor might not have rated Kumar’s service more highly. There was a good deal of evidence pro and con. Provost Bis-choff, who began by regarding Kumar’s service as “far less than should be expected,” finally recommended tenure, and came to accept refereeing as a form of service. What types of service, and how much, make for “excellence” is unclear; the criterion is obviously subjective and after reading the entire record I feel no more enlightened. But I certainly do not find the record sufficiently of one piece to support the court’s implied conclusion that an honest Chancellor could not have concluded, as did Bromery, that Kumar’s service was less than excellent.
Judge Wyzanski points out that if Ku-mar was less than excellent in service, he could not be said to be entitled to tenure. Even assuming excellence in research and professional activity, Kumar must then have lacked excellence in two of the three fields — service and teaching — since even *17the district court acknowledged that a finding of something less than excellence would be warranted as to his teaching.
2. Teaching
Teaching, of course, was the skill in which Kumar was found to be most lacking by Bromery and others. It is also the area where, in my opinion, the district court most clearly set up its own opposing standards and rejected out-of-hand all views to the contrary.
The court conceded that “[a]t first blush” teaching would appear to be a source of concern because of low student evaluations of Kumar on official University questionnaires (not to be confused with the unofficial Wolf report questionnaires). The court went on to castigate Chancellor Bromery for giving these much weight, finding as a fact that favorable peer assessments of Kumar’s teaching were more reliable indicators of his teaching skill than were the student evaluations.
It was not the court’s prerogative to make this judgment. Chancellor Bromery testified that, in his opinion, at a public institution like the University of Massachusetts the most important of the three tenure criteria
“is teaching because we have an obligation to the Commonwealth and to the citizens of the Commonwealth to teach the students in the classroom.”
He went on to defend the importance of student evaluations, saying,
“The students, I think, are probably the only ones in a classroom that know whether they are learning anything.”
Bromery gave less weight to a favorable teaching evaluation made by one professor who sat in on Dr. Kumar’s class,
“because a Professor goes in equipped with considerably more knowledge than the graduate student or undergraduate sitting in front of the Professor, and the reason why we are in business at the University of Massachusetts is to transmit knowledge to those students.”
Bromery’s views were in opposition to those expressed by many of Kumar’s faculty colleagues and by a faculty committee, who downgraded student evaluations as too often reflective of a student’s short-term interests and, possibly, the kind of grades the student was getting. Kumar’s colleagues believed that his teaching and course materials were good; in their view the unhappiness of many beginning students stemmed from the fact that Kumar was a financial theorist and required a mathematical approach.
Whatever the actual truth of the matter — and the subject is one on which a single answer is unlikely — the Chancellor clearly had a right to determine that Ku-mar was not, in his view, an excellent teacher or even a good one, given the Chancellor’s opinion that student evaluations were important and that teaching was critical. There was ample support for a low teaching evaluation notwithstanding other contrary evidence. Associate Provost Bis-choff testified that student evaluations in print-outs in Kumar’s initial tenure file were “some of the lowest I had ever seen.” Kumar’s initial tenure recommendations suggest numerous doubts, even by those recommending him, concerning the quality of his teaching. The Dean’s comment in a 1974-75 report was that, while Kumar had an outstanding year in terms of research and publication achievements,
“[f]rom a teaching perspective, Professor Kumar is rated adequate or below adequate. He has experienced difficulty in this dimension historically. Additionally, his service contribution is generally mod-est____”
It is true that there was also much evidence suggesting that in the advanced courses, and by some of the better students, he was well regarded as a teacher. And many peers thought his materials and methods were strong. There was also evidence of recent improvement. A different Chancellor might have reached a different result. Indeed, I am willing to concede, for purposes of argument, that Bromery could have been wrong. But our job is not to decide whether we agree with Bromery’s assessment, or with his philosophy concern*18ing teaching and teacher evaluation. As Chancellor of the University, he was entitled to make educational policy choices and these, to be credible, did not have to please everyone else, nor did they have to appeal to a court. Bromery’s decision that Kumar lacked strength in teaching was not so clearly bizarre, weak or otherwise unsupportable as to create a reasonable inference that Bromery was trying to cover up a discreditable reason for denying tenure.
The judge, to be sure, saw Bromery’s demeanor, heard his testimony, and was not impressed. He also doubtless took account of the harshness of Bromery’s evaluation that Kumar had no strength in teaching, where arguably Kumar had at least some strength. But given the University’s right to make its own tenure decision, I do not think that an inference of pretext, which is tantamount to a finding of. bad faith, can be derived simply from run-of-the-mill disagreement with the way the university’s decision-makers tell their story and defend their views. The tenure decision is, by its nature, imprecise and judgmental. If a finding of “pretext” can be derived from nothing more than the judge’s belief that the university’s decision is not a good one, supported by an unfavorable impression of the demeanor of those delegated to make the decision, there is then little difference between the evidence needed to find discrimination and that needed to persuade a court that the university simply erred as to a tenure decision. For a reason to be found pretextual on its face it must, in Judge Aldrich’s words, be “obviously weak or implausible”, not merely less convincing to the judge than it was to some others.
I conclude that the Chancellor’s determination that Kumar lacked strength in teaching and had only possible strength in service was not so devoid of support in the tenure record as, for that reason alone, to raise any inference of discrimination.
B. Specific Incidents Bearing on Discrimination Claim
1. Professor Whiston’s Case
In the labor decisions referred to earlier, this court indicated that an employer’s reason may be found pretextual if the reason the employer asserts is “manifestly unequally applied.” Eastern Smelting, 598 F.2d at 670-71. Thus, if the University’s formal requirements for tenure were applied to the last syllable in Dr. Kumar’s case but relaxed in others, an adverse inference could be drawn.
The district court hinted that the granting of tenure to Professor William Whiston reflected such disparity in treatment, although it conceded that there was “no doubt that Whiston’s and Kumar’s cases were different in the issues raised concerning their qualifications.”
In fact, the two cases are not only entirely different, but Whiston’s strengths lay in precisely those areas — teaching and service — in which Kumar was weakest. At the departmental level, Whiston received an adverse tenure recommendation from a majority of the personnel committee because of doubts about his research and publications, although his excellence in teaching was universally conceded. Thereafter, the School of Business Administration’s personnel committee and its Dean enthusiastically supported him as a “master teacher” and also as demonstrating excellence in service (he had served on national committees of various sorts, on key committees of the school, as an advisor to the National Science Foundation and Department of Commerce, as editor of the business school’s publication, and as an advisor to businessmen and public administrators). The dean described him as the single most visible source of favorable publicity for the business school in the New England press.
One of Bromery’s primary reasons for rejecting Kumar was his belief that teaching was the most important criterion in tenure decisions. Whiston, conceded by all to be an excellent teacher, would have been a man after Bromery’s heart in this regard, and the fact that he was granted tenure demonstrates the University’s consistency, not its inequity, on the score.
The district court perceived inequity in the fact that Whiston was “helped” at *19higher levels of the tenure process after getting off to a shaky start, while the addition of further harmful information hurt Kumar’s tenure application at these higher levels. Kumar did receive some help as he went on, however; and in any case Associate Provost Bischoff clearly had serious problems with Kumar’s application early in the process on the basis of the lackluster initial endorsements and Ku-mar’s apparent teaching weaknesses. It was certainly not unkind of Bischoff to ask for more information rather than to reject him outright. Dean Odiorne’s subsequent letter, generally positive, included reference to the Wolf data and was not as enthusiastic as the dean’s later endorsement of Whiston. The court below suggests that because adverse viewpoints were passed along as to Kumar’s application but not as to Whiston’s, there must have been a double standard. I do not see why this follows. The two men were altogether different, had different constituencies, strengths, weaknesses and images, and attracted different responses. I can see no basis for inferring that Kumar’s race or nationality was a determining factor.2
Whiston’s case sheds interesting light on the view expressed by two faculty members, not credited by the district court, that emphasis on teaching was a “pretext” because normally the “real emphasis” in tenure decisions was on research and publications. This view seems at variance with the granting of tenure to Whiston, an excellent teacher, but a doubtful scholar. No tangible evidence was provided to support the view that the Chancellor’s emphasis on teaching ability as a tenure criterion was a pretext. There was no evidence that Brom-ery or the other administrators who rejected Kumar had in other cases preferred scholars to teachers.
I conclude that the evidence concerning Whiston, far from showing an improper disparity in treatment, confirms the non-pretextual nature of the reasons advanced by the University for denying tenure to Kumar.
2. The Wolf Report
The “Wolf Report” was a memo from Associate Dean Wolf of the school of Business Administration reflecting 24 M.B.A. students’ ratings of Dr. Kumar’s teaching stemming from their participation in BA 606, a basic course taught by Kumar. The survey was not scientifically done. Though the comments were highly critical, they were not in any way racist. The underlying questionnaire had been prepared by the Graduate Business Association (GBA), a student group interested in improving the administration of the school; and was designed to survey student reaction to various business school teachers. The answers about Kumar were furnished to Associate Dean Wolf when Odiorne, Dean of the Business School, was seeking more feedback on Kumar’s teaching at the request of Associate Provost Bischoff. At the time, Bischoff was reviewing the favorable tenure recommendations received from the business school and from Ku-mar’s department. His initial reaction, conveyed to Dean Odiorne, had been negative: Bischoff wrote that he could not “find convincing evidence for strength in either teaching or service”, and said he would recommend against tenure unless his perception could be changed. He made this statement before seeing the Wolf report data and testified he knew nothing of the GBA group at this time.
Odiorne responded with a renewed recommendation for tenure. Along with much information favorable to Kumar, he men*20tioned the unfavorable student evaluations of Kumar's teaching contained in the Wolf Report.
When Kumar learned of the Wolf Report, he pointed out the unscientific nature of the survey and asserted that under the University’s practices it did not belong in his tenure file. When Chancellor Bromery reviewed Kumar’s application in 1979, he was under explicit instructions not to consider the Wolf Report data and he expressly said he did not do so.
Later Dean Odiorne dramatically transformed the nature of the debate over the Wolf Report from one concerning its unscientific and unofficial nature to one concerning implicit racism. The Dean told an E.E.O.C. investigator that he had overheard from outside the room comments made at a meeting of the GBA — the group that later prepared the survey culminating in the Wolf Report — in which Dr. Kumar was referred .to as “the little gook” and “that black bastard”. There were also comments that “he has to go”. Odiorne noted that the president of the group had had serious academic difficulty in Kumar’s course. The Dean stated,
“... I saw no direct evidence whatsoever of racism in Whitmore [the university’s administration building], only to the extent that subsequently the personnel decision on Kumar lent credibilty and weight to evidence generated by this student group. In my opinion, that evidence is properly impeachable evidence.”
Odiorne went on to say that the student group in question actively and persistently pursued the mission of getting rid of Dr. Kumar. He felt that it managed to “reach” some administrators, including himself, although he declined to give weight to their views. Odiorne (who supported Kumar throughout) opined that a different decision would have resulted in Kumar’s tenure case had it not been for the activities of this group. The Dean described the GBA as being “rightly concerned about the quality of teaching and improvement of the quality of teaching”. But, he continued,
“There were a couple of members of the group ... who fastened upon Kumar as being a particular target for the improvement of teaching in the school.”
These students referred amongst themselves to Kumar as a “black bastard” and a “gook”, although they did not say that this was the reason he should be fired. Dean Odiorne was unable to identify any particular individual who had made the racial slurs. In his view, however, “calculus was more of their problem than color”, since they also said that he was too rigorous as a teacher.
Dean Odiorne’s is the only actual evidence of racism in the university community; 3 and Odiorne conceded he “saw no direct evidence of racism whatever” in the university administration, where the adverse tenure decision was made. The question is whether the racist remarks of “a couple of” student GBA members who opposed Dr. Kumar on grounds of his teaching can be inferred to have infected the entire tenure process, to the point of corrupting the decision of the Chancellor— himself a member of a minority group— and various other administrators.
I cannot conclude that the remarks had such an impact. Odiorne attributed the remarks to, at most, a handful of students. Even if, as seems possible, some of the student ratings compiled in the Wolf Report were infected by racism, it is by no means clear that all were. And there is simply no credible evidence that any racism *21that may have affected the Wolf report affected Chancellor Bromery.
Chancellor Bromery testified that while he had at one time read the Wolf Report, he recognized it for what it was, and,
“I put little credence in an individual faculty member or individual administrator who has no role in this decision going off on their own and gathering their own information, which they want to insert in the report.”
Moreover, it was unnecessary to go to the Wolf Report to find low student ratings of Kumar’s teaching. Bischoff’s concern over Kumar’s teaching arose before the Wolf Report had surfaced. In his final decision the Chancellor was under express injunction to ignore the Wolf Report. Only if we assume, on no evidence except the fact that he rejected the tenure application, that the Chancellor betrayed this trust, is it possible to affirm the lower court.
The Chancellor testified that he saw no sign of racism in the file. He said,
“Of course, everybody who makes a negative decision, one could interpret that [as racism], but I could see nothing in the material that I considered in making my judgment with the Provost on those three areas were racist, so that I could understand them, and I believe that I would have a sensitivity, maybe more so than the average person to subtle racism, but one can’t read what is in the mind of a student’s evaluation or a faculty member that evaluates their peers.”
I conclude that the evidence of racism on the part of a few students is insufficient grounds, on this record, to find that the University denied tenure on grounds of race or national origin.
3. Procedural Errors
Many claims were made of procedural and bureaucratic skulduggery, or at least sloppiness, and some instances may have occurred. Kumar asserted that at various times when he inspected his tenure file important papers favorable to his cause were missing, presumably because they were elsewhere in the administrative office. Nearly all of the papers were eventually restored. By the time of the final review by Chancellor Bromery in 1979, the file seems to have been largely complete. While misplacement of these papers may reflect sloppiness and inefficiency, it is difficult-to believe that someone having racist inclinations would have deliberately set about denuding the file, nor are the omissions explained on any such basis.
The other procedural claims seem to me similarly unpersuasive as evidence of racism. It appears that Kumar’s case was surrounded by in-fighting for and against his retention. There is no evidence, however, that faculty members who opposed him did so because of his race or nationality as opposed to their sincerely-held personal convictions, right or wrong; nor that alleged procedural errors in the tenure process were the result of racial bias. Dean Odiorne stated that he did not perceive any racism to exist at the administrative levels of the University. If it did, there was no evidence of it. There was no statistical evidence that blacks, Asians, or foreigners generally have fared badly at the University, either as to tenure or otherwise. There was no evidence that the individuals who played the major roles in Dr. Kumar’s tenure decision had a record of racism or discrimination.
III. Conclusion
I conclude that the district court was clearly erroneous in its finding of discrimination. I vote to reverse the judgment of the district court.

. The district court described the University’s articulated reasons as that
"the honestly held doubts of Bischoff (at least initially), Alfange, Puryear, and most importantly, Bromery about plaintiff's achievements in teaching, service and research constitute legitimate, non-discriminatory reasons for the denial of tenure.”
Because of what the court viewed as violations of the University’s internal procedures and the incompleteness of the tenure file before Bis-choff, Alfange and Puryear, the court concluded that Bromery’s 1979 review was the pivotal decision-making point.

. Dean Odiorne and others (all of whom supported Kumar) made occasional references to his nationality, noting, for example, that he was "foreign born” and that "his modes of communication are not that of a native born American.” This particular comment was followed by the remark, “He is perfectly lucid in his language." I agree with Judge Wyzanski that comments on the ability of a teacher to communicate with his students are proper and are not violative of the law. Here they were made by people who favored the granting of tenure, whereas those officials who did not favor tenure did not make any such references. I thus fail to see how this can be seized upon as reflecting racial bias in the adverse tenure decision.

. There were, to be sure, innuendos concerning racism in the testimony of two supporters of Dr. Kumar, Professors Osborn and Ludtke. It was intimated, for example, that a tenured professor named Pao Chang may have left the university because of a sense that Asians were not well received; there was also some suggestion that Ven Katesan’s prospects were harmed by racism. Most or all of this testimony was inad-missable hearsay and opinions constituting no more than the witnesses’s speculations. I do not think that these innuendos, which were never fleshed out in any meaningful way, can be regarded as evidence tending to establish that the university administrators who rejected Ku-mar did so for racist motives.