Vanderbilt Defeats Professor’s Bid to Undo Disability Bias Loss

Vanderbilt University fought off an associate professor’s attempt to revive a lawsuit alleging the school refused to promote her to full professor because of her disability, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.

The university provided a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for shutting down the professor’s promotion when it demonstrated that her research record fell short of its quantity and quality expectations, and she didn’t show that Vanderbilt’s explanation was pretext for disability discrimination, the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit said in an unpublished opinion.

Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte, who has multiple sclerosis, is a professor within Vanderbilt’s Portuguese and ...