Whether or not Mukund Vengalattore dated a graduate student under his supervision, Cornell University failed him and his accuser when it, as Vengalattore says, passed judgment without properly investigating the claim.
After the grad student filed a 2014 sexual misconduct complaint against Vengalattore, an atomic physicist and tenure-track College of Arts and Sciences assistant professor, Title IX investigators found him in violation of university policy without bothering to hear his side of the story, according to a case argued before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last week.
“Cornell denied him any hearing,” said Richard Samp, senior litigation counsel for the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which is representing Vengalattore. “It denied him a right to cross-examine the witnesses. It even denied him the right to present his own live witnesses.