On May 27, Lucy Marsh did an interview over the phone with the Clarion about the lawsuit between seven female law professors and DU’s Sturm College of Law that reached a $2.6 million legal settlement. Marsh was the first professor to file a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commision (EEOC) that she was being paid thousands of dollars less than her male colleagues.
Dr. Marsh told the Clarion about her experience while participating in lawsuit. She said that she faced some backlash but received an overwhelming amount of support from her students, including them giving her a standing ovation and flowers when news of the lawsuit was released, and them honoring her at the Women’s March in Denver.
Despite being afraid that the Dean of the law school might retaliate, the professor said that she thinks it’s important that she didn’t quit her job. She said some people in similar situations will quit their jobs, but that’s wrong, because the responsibility is on the employer not the employee: “We all have work to do, and it’s time for employers to step up and take legal responsibility. Paying 2.66 million was a silly waste of money.”
Regarding the settlement, Marsh said that she is satisfied with it and that it’s clear that DU will have to comply with the law. However, she believes Chancellor Rebecca Chopp’s statement sent to the DU community in response to the lawsuit was “silly,” especially considering her previous statement that DU stands by their “historical system of evaluation and merit pay.” She said that she’s even gotten negative feedback from DU alumni donors about the message. In response to the email, which stated, “One of our [DU’s] cornerstone commitments as a university is to be an academic community based on fairness, equity and merit,” she said, “The judge very clearly thought that DU was doing something wrong and better straighten up.”
Still, Marsh said that she is amazed at the publicity that the settlement has received, hoping that it will have an impact on other universities: “The publicity this settlement has gotten shows that this is something that is important to people. It shows people care, and I hope that this has a ripple effect on other universities and employers—that it shows it’s time to get their act together.”
Colorado U.S. District Court Judge Wiley Daniel seemed to agree. Near the end of the hearing for the lawsuit, he talked about his experience visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which highlights the struggles that Black Americans have faced from slavery to Jim Crow laws, saying, “It’s a wonderful lesson on the history of this country, and this Court sometimes gets concerned that sometimes we don’t always learn from history. And we need to make sure we learn from our history and we understand the importance of moving forward, not backwards, moving forward, not moving sideways.”
He continued, “So, again, I just want to say that because I think all of this is interrelated. It’s important that particularly the University of Denver Sturm College of Law which teaches law has, as a part of its fabric, an overriding obligation to make sure that students aided by professors and administrators understand the importance of some of these laws and really can be advocates in the right way once they get their training and graduate.”
Marsh will continue to work in the law school as a professor this coming academic year, and is currently working on the Tribal Wills Project, which she established in 2013, taking law students to the Southern Ute and Ute Mountain reservations to write wills for tribal members under a complex federal statute.
