Inside Higher Ed
By Emma Whitford
June 8, 2018
A doctoral student at Fairleigh Dickinson University who complained to administrators about being penalized by a professor for missing classes while on maternity leave plans to file a formal gender-discrimination complaint against the university. The student says the professor refused to accommodate her request to miss class so she could give birth, a denial that would be a violation of federal law.
Gayla Toledano, a student in the university's graduate psychology program, requested the time off in writing from her professor, Jennifer Cleveland, who told Toledano she could not miss class without it affecting her final grade. Toledano emailed Cleveland in January, after classes had already begun, to explain the arrangement she made with the director of the psychology program allowing her to miss the first two weeks of classes and then Skype in for four more weeks. Three out of four of Toledano’s professors accommodated those absences, but Cleveland told Toledano in an email that she should have contacted her before the class started to make such arrangements, in which case she would have suggested another option.
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