Employee’s Complaints Made to College Accreditation Agency About Employer Do NOT qualify as Protected Activity

 

Aguillard v. Louisiana College - Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals

Facts:  Joe Aguillard (“Aguillard”) became President of Louisiana College in January of 2005.  He continued in that role until he stepped down in July of 2014 due to health reasons.  However, he remained at Louisiana College as a tenured faculty member and president emeritus until he was terminated on March 31, 2016.  The day after his termination, Aguillard filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) and claimed his successor engaged in a patter of harassment and created a hostile work environment.  Aguillard claimed the harassment and termination constituted religious discrimination, disability discrimination, and retaliation for opposing illegal practices in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (“Title VII”) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (“ADA”).  Aguillar proceeded to file a second EEOC complaint on July 8, 2016 and made similar allegations against Louisiana College.

Of note, Aguillard submitted a complaint to the Southern Association (a college accreditation group) on June 7, 2016 in which he alleged that Louisiana College had taken several inappropriate acts, including violating its tenure policies and improperly terminating Aguillard, illegally and improperly changing grades of certain nursing students at Louisiana College, and covered up an incident on campus in which one student shot another.

Louisiana College proceeded to sue Aguillard for defamation and Aguillard filed suit against Louisiana College for the allegations raised in his EEOC complaints.  The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Louisiana College on the grounds that Louisiana College’s defamation suit did not violate the anti-retaliation provisions of Title VII or the ADA.  Aguillard subsequently appealed.

Holding:  (Note, this case brief only analyzes the Title VII and ADA portions of Aguillard’s appeal.)

Of course, both Title VII and the ADA prohibit retaliation against an individual that files a discrimination charge with the EEOC, testifies before the EEOC, assists the EEOC, or participates in an EEOC investigation.  In order to establish a prima facie case of discrimination under Title VII or the ADA, a plaintiff must show that 1) he participate in an activity protected under the statutes; 2) his employer took an adverse employment action against him; and 3) a causal connection exists between the protected activity and the adverse action.  As readers could guess, “close timing between an employee’s protected activity and an adverse action against him may provide the ‘causal connection’ required to make out a prima facie case of retaliation.”  However, “cases that accept mere temporal proximity between an employer’s knowledge of protected activity and an adverse employment action as sufficient evidence of causality to establish a prima facie case uniformly hold that the temporal proximity must be ‘very close.’”

In this case, the Court of Appeals held that Aguillard failed to identify any summary judgment evidence that suggested his protected activity caused Louisiana College’s defamation suit.  The Court disagreed with Aguillard’s claim that Louisiana College’s defamation claims were based on his EEOC complaints.  While Louisiana College’s pleadings mentioned the EEOC complaints for context, the actual claims against Aguillard are based on statements that Aguillard made to the Southern Association.  These statements, unlike the ones made to the EEOC, were not protected activity.

As for Aguillard’s claim that he could establish causation via temporal proximity, the Court was again unswayed.  The issue in this situation was the fact that temporal proximity is not enough to establish causation when there had previously been a five month gap between protected activity and the alleged retaliation in other cases.  In this case, Louisiana College’s defamation suit was filed ten months after Aguillard’s second EEOC complaint and therefore not close enough in time to establish temporal proximity.

Judgment:  The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the granting of summary judgment for the employer on the grounds that the employee failed to identify any protected activity that he engaged in which would qualify as protected activity under Title VII or the ADA.  Further, his complaints to the EEOC were not close in enough in time to his termination to establish causation in regard to his retaliation claim against his employer.

The Takeaway:  This case serves as a reminder that while there is some protection against retaliation when an employee engages in protected activity (such as the filing of an EEOC complaint), when an employee engages in unprotected activity and subsequently experiences an adverse employment action, that will not result in a valid Title VII or ADA claim, such as in this case.

Majority Opinion Judge:  Per curiam

Date:  August 19, 2020

Opinion:  http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/unpub/19/19-30941.0.pdf