Appeals court upholds suspension of UC Berkeley professor for sexual harassment

A state appeals court has upheld the suspension of a disgraced UC Berkeley architecture professor who lost his job after claims of sexual harassment from a former graduate student came to light.

Nezar AlSayyad — an internationally recognized scholar who started teaching within the university’s Architecture and City and Regional Planning departments in 1985 — opted to retire in 2018 instead of serving a three-year suspension without pay for violating the university’s code of conduct.

However, AlSayyad, who was born in Cairo, Egypt, promptly sued the UC Regents over the sanctions, seeking damages from what he felt was a “weak case” against him that was based on discrimination of his national origin.

Following a five-month investigation into the allegations, UC Chancellor Carol Christ handed down the discipline in August of 2018. She overturned a one-year suspension that had previously been recommended by a committee that oversaw tenured and privileged professors, which rejected many accusations but ruled that AlSayyad made a “momentary overstep.”

AlSayyad claimed that the Regents “failed to establish a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason” why Christ could overrule the previous committee recommendation, according to court documents. He also argued that in the years prior to his own suspension, the university “imposed penalties less harsh” on other, non-Egyptian faculty members facing similar complaints of sexual harassment.

At the time, his attorney, Dan Siegel said that AlSayyad’s reputation had wrongly been “left in tatters” over the matter.

The First District Court of Appeals disagreed.

According to a June 7 filing, investigators found a “preponderance of evidence” supporting accusations that AlSayyad in 2016 sexually harassed Eva Hagberg Fisher, his subordinate in the department, and engaged in divisive, manipulative and harassing behavior. The complaints ranged from repeated requests for dinner dates, physically intimate touches and a proposal for an paid trip to Las Vegas.

Additionally, before the student took her qualifying exam for her Ph.D., AlSayyad allegedly told her that he “hoped she felt as good as she looked” and later offered her a job as a research assistant.

AlSayyad referred questions to his lawyer; Siegel said both he and his client were disappointed by the ruling.

He said employment discrimination cases that challenge disciplinary action are inherently difficult, because that places a burden on the plaintiff to show that they were treated differently than others in similar situations. However, when involving these types of allegations, he argued that there are rarely people who are in exactly identical situations that can be compared.

“That creates a gray area for the court, and I think this court really took advantage of that to accept the university’s idea that the comparators were different,” Siegel said in an interview. “I had hoped that the Court of Appeal would take the issues on more straightforwardly, but it seems that they did not want to put themselves in a position where they were disagreeing with the conclusions reached by the Chancellor at UC Berkeley.”

According to the June ruling, Christ testified that her decision to pursue the longer suspension was based on AlSayyad’s “continuing failure to accept responsibility for the impact of [his] behavior,” which she and other administrators called “egregious.”

Additionally, Vice Provost Hermalin testified that AlSayyad’s behavior included “grooming the student, isolating the student, providing the student with false information that harmed her career, involving the student in departmental politics and sexually harassing the student, including touching her.”

The court agreed with these arguments, and also ruled that the other professors AlSayyad claimed were given less harsh consequences had each expressed remorse — either negotiating settlements or accepting a suspension.

While the appeals court ruling is legally the end of the line for AlSayyad, Siegel added that the retired professor continues to maintain that his actions with the former graduate student were part of an “appropriate professional and personal relationship” — meaning there was no reason for him to express remorse.

AlSayyad also challenged the due process of the decision in 2018, but that petition was denied by a trial court in May 2019.

By retiring, he was able to collect his pension and health benefits from UC Berkeley, where he earned $211,000 a year. However, that choice meant that his emeritus status was curtailed for three years.

AlSayyad’s profile is currently active on the university’s website, and a UC Berkeley spokesperson said his emeritus status was reactivated by Aug. 2021. Additionally, while AlSayyad was barred from campus in 2018 through June 2021, that restriction has since been resolved.