NEWS
LAWSUIT TAKES LCC TO
TASK FOR NOT STOPPING
STALKER STUDENT
Nadia Raza’s lawsuit against Lane Community Col-
lege, filed Jan. 21, alleges that the administration failed
to protect the tenured instructor from an aggressive stu-
dent felon and stalker.
Raza’s 19-page complaint, filed in U.S. District Court
in Eugene by attorney Jennifer Middleton, is not the first
attempt to get the LCC administration to adopt immedi-
ate measures to better protect its staff from sexual ad-
vances and physical threats from students.
The suit calls for LCC to drastically change its sexual
harassment policies, as well as its “unlawful discrimina-
tion” based on sex or race. Raza is Pakistani, American
and Muslim.
Her lawsuit also seeks economic compensation for
her lost work hours — she switched to teaching online
classes part-time for the past year and a half — resulting
from fear that the student, identified in the lawsuit as
“S.S.,” would be able to locate her on the LCC campus.
The suit does not detail a dollar amount.
“Nadia’s frustration, to put it mildly, with the ad-
ministration is consistent with a pattern we’ve seen for
years,” says LCC’s faculty union president Jim Salt.
“We’ve had a long-standing issue with the administra-
tion in how they respond to situations like this, where
faculty members are facing harassment or threats from
students.”
Salt, who works as an instructor in the Sociology De-
partment with Raza, watched in 2014 as Raza stopped
being able to hold office hours, stopped signing up to
teach in the classroom and eventually moved out of her
own home after multiple run-ins with the stalker.
The administration, the suit alleges, consistently re-
fused to give Raza information about S.S., including his
enrollment status and whether he had been kicked off
campus. This made it difficult for Raza to attain docu-
mentation for a restraining order.
It wasn’t until three months into Raza and others
sending emails to the administration, the suit says, that
LCC Public Safety performed a background check on
the student and found he was a convicted felon with
multiple restraining orders. Raza obtained her own re-
straining order against S.S. in late April 2014.
S.S. was arrested on May 5 of that year at an apart-
‘We’ve had a long-
standing issue with
the administration
in how they
respond to
situations like this,
where faculty
members are facing
harassment or
threats from
students .’
— L C C U N I O N P R E S I D E N T J I M S A LT
ment complex, where he told police he was looking for
Raza, the suit says.
Salt says, “She was looking for ways to try to mini-
mize her susceptibility to attack. As a friend and col-
league, I was very concerned for her.”
Raza’s complaint alleges that, at one point, “LCC
gave Nadia Raza a pre-printed ‘personalized safety plan’
that was designed for domestic violence victims. The
pamphlet contained advice like keeping loose change
with her at all times in case she had to make an emer-
gency phone call.” Another suggestion was to download
a “safety-related app recommended by Dr. Phil for her
phone.”
In April 2014, the faculty union, Lane Community
College Education Association, pushed through a bar-
gaining agreement for faculty that spells out the same
concerns addressed in Raza’s lawsuit: Faculty members
don’t feel protected or informed against sexual harass-
ment from students.
“If you make a complaint or ask for help, the admin-
istration is very forceful in telling you that you aren’t
allowed to talk about this with anybody else, because
to do this would violate the confidentiality agreement,”
Salt says.
When Raza was receiving almost daily emails from
the student stalker, four other LCC instructors had al-
ready reported similar disturbing emails from the same
student. But because of the administration’s policy, only
two of the four women even knew about the others’ situ-
ation.
“It wasn’t broadly known,” Salt says.
The union’s bargaining agreement was eventually
written into the faculty’s contract in the spring of 2014.
“The key piece allowed the faculty member to request a
different assignment if the administration hadn’t solved
the issue. It’s a fallback position,” Salt says.
Salt sent out a faculty-wide email on Jan. 22 in sup-
port of the lawsuit, writing that “the association strongly
supports Nadia’s courageous refusal to let the adminis-
tration avoid their responsibilities …”
LCC declined to comment on the case. “We don’t
comment at all on lawsuits or pending litigation,” says
Joan Aschim, public information officer for LCC.
Middleton tells EW that her legal team sent out a
press release to the media about the lawsuit to “start a
conversation.”
“It’s an important issue that I think the commu-
nity needs to know about, particularly after [the] UCC
[shootings] and the concerns about safety on campus,”
Middleton says. — Jeslyn Lemke
EDITOR’S NOTE: The lawsuit discusses that Nadia Raza’s stalker attempted
to contact Raza via EW. Raza has written viewpoints for this paper. Jennifer
Middleton, Raza’s lawyer in the suit, is part of Johnson, Johnson and Schaller,
the law firm of EW co-owner Art Johnson.
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eugeneweekly.com • January 28, 2016
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