Penn State Beats White Employee’s Suit Over Anti-Racism Training

A Penn State writing professor lacks evidence that job-related trainings and discussions regarding anti-racism and White privilege made his work environment unlawfully hostile, a federal judge ruled.

The 12 incidents over 3.5 years the former employee cited weren’t frequent enough to be pervasive harassment under federal or state law, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said. None of the incidents were sufficiently severe under Third Circuit precedent to support a jury finding of hostile environment harassment, the court said.

Judge Wendy Beetlestone, who had previously denied a motion to dismiss Zack De Piero’s harassment claims while granting dismissal of his other allegations, found a recent decision by a Seattle federal court “instructive.” Like the employer in Diemert v. City of Seattle, Pennsylvania State University was entitled to summary judgment on De Piero’s hostile environment claims partly because of the context in which the alleged harassment occurred, Beetlestone said.

De Piero worked at the university’s Abington, Pa., campus, and was exposed to the allegedly discriminatory comments during scholarly discussions, including a campus-wide town hall, a professional development meeting, and a guest-lecturer presentation, the judge said. He may have voiced discomfort with statements such as “White Teachers Are a Problem,” but he was assured by an affirmative action officer that the statements weren’t an attack on him personally and that he doesn’t “carry the burden of” the White race and isn’t responsible for everything that’s happened or for what White people have or haven’t done, she said.

The court rejected De Piero’s contention that the circumstances would’ve been viewed and treated differently if the topic had involved deriding Black people or “Black privilege.” Third Circuit precedent includes cases in which “equally offensive comments directed at Black employees have been found to be insufficiently pervasive,” the court said.

The incidents cited by De Piero in support of his claims under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. §1981, and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act included e-mails discussing scholarship regarding anti-racist writing assessments, promoting an event regarding the “rhetoric and writing of critical race theory,” regarding the campus’s hiring of a White police officer, and commemorating Juneteenth, the opinion said. He also pointed to complaints his program coordinator filed against him alleging “sex and political ideology” bias in his questioning and pushback during the trainings or discussions and how the university handled her complaints.

A jury couldn’t find the alleged abuse sufficiently extreme to be severe harassment, Beetlestone said. She cited several cases in which summary judgment was granted “on claims predicated on similar comments made to White plaintiffs.”

And the incidents didn’t occur daily or even weekly and therefore weren’t pervasive, the judge said. No racist comment was ever directed at De Piero and he voluntarily attended and actively participated in the discussions, she said.

Allen Harris PLLC represented De Piero. Saul Ewing LLP represented the defendants.

The case is De Piero v. Pa. State Univ., 2025 BL 73228, E.D. Pa., No. 2:23-cv-02281, 3/6/25.