UC Berkeley law dean resigns amid harassment scandal

The dean of the prestigious UC Berkeley School of Law resigned Thursday amid a sex harassment scandal.

Sujit Choudhry’s departure comes a day after he was suspended from the top-ranked law school with reduced pay after his former assistant filed a sex harassment lawsuit Tuesday in Alameda County Superior Court.

UC Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination had investigated the claims by Tyann Sorrell and concluded in July that Choudhry “violated policy (and) demonstrated a failure to understand the power dynamic and the effect of his actions on the (assistant) personally and in her employment,” said Provost Claude Steele in a statement Wednesday.

The campus’ investigation of Choudhry concluded quietly last summer as another sex harassment scandal was about to break open:

Investigators found in June that another Cal professor, the famed planet hunter Geoffrey Marcy, had violated UC’s sex harassment policy between 2001 and 2010 by giving massages and other unwanted attention to at least four female students.

Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said at the time that he could not fire Marcy because the harassment happened more than three years earlier, and UC’s tenure policy has a three-year statute of limitations.

The suit says Sorrell is a former victim of domestic and sexual abuse.

“I am horrified not only by the egregious actions of our dean, but also by the university's efforts to shield him from responsibility,” law student Paul Monge Rodriguez posted on Facebook.

The university’s decision to slap the dean on the wrist with a one-year 10 percent salary reduction signals exactly how little they value the well-being of the victim.