A San Jose community college district has agreed to pay $100,000 to settle a free-speech lawsuit by a professor who was fired after allegedly telling students that male homosexuality is caused by stress during pregnancy and that true lesbians don’t exist.
July 23, 2010
By Bob Egelko
June Sheldon denied making the statements that a student complaint attributed to her. She said she actually told her human heredity class at San Jose Community College in 2007 that the cause of homosexuality was a complex subject and that one researcher had found a relationship between prenatal stress and male sexual orientation.
But the college said Sheldon had admitted to an administrator that the student’s complaint was largely accurate. The two sides reached a settlement, with the facts still unresolved, after a federal judge refused to dismiss the suit and ruled that teachers have free-speech rights in the classroom when their comments are “within academic norms.”
In addition to the $100,000 payment, the San Jose/Evergreen Community College District agreed to remove the firing from Sheldon’s record, her lawyers said Thursday. They said she is now teaching at another Bay Area school, which they declined to identify.
“Professors shouldn’t be fired simply for doing their jobs,” said attorney David Hacker of the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian conservative organization that represented Sheldon.
He said there was no evidence to substantiate the complaint, but that even if there were such evidence, Sheldon should not have been fired.
“Christian students and professors shouldn’t be punished for expressing ideas in the marketplace of ideas,” Hacker said. “Students don’t have the right to not be offended in college.”
The district said Thursday the settlement was a compromise that did not include any admission of wrongdoing.
Sheldon taught chemistry and biology in the district for 21 years. According to her suit, a student in her human heredity course asked her in June 2007 how heredity affects homosexual behavior, a topic in a test the class had just taken.
She said she replied that the subject was complex, theories differed, and that one researcher had found a correlation between prenatal stress and male homosexuality but no such relationship to female homosexuality.
Two months later, the dean of Sheldon’s department told her a student had complained that she had made “unscientific and offensive” statements. The student said Sheldon had told her class that a German study proved stress causes male homosexuality, that there are no real lesbians – just women who tire of relationships with men – and that there are hardly any gay men in the Middle East because women there are treated well.
The dean, Leandra Martin, later said she had investigated and concluded the professor was teaching “misinformation as science.” The district then fired her.
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.