Professor Sues Hamilton College for Racial Discrimination

Dr. Joseph Mwantuali, professor of French at Hamilton CollegeDr. Joseph Mwantuali said that he didn’t know what to expect when he joined the French and Francophone studies department at Hamilton College in upstate New York. It was a small unit, with fewer than five professors, and Mwantuali, an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was the only faculty member of color.

“It was my first job in the United States, so it was a pretty new milieu for me,” he said. “I was just trying to see how things go.”

According to Mwantuali, how things would go became clear when a colleague came to his office and asked him to fight.

“She wanted me to send in grades, and I did not have time because I was working on the seniors’ grades, [which] are the priority for the registrar,” said Mwantuali. “She said, ‘Stop whatever you’re doing and give me the grades right now.’ I said, ‘No, I can’t do that.’ She said, ‘Let’s fight.’ That was the moment where I got my first shock.”

He said that moment was the start of over fifteen years of alleged racially biased treatment at the hands of his colleagues and Hamilton administrators,  Mwantuali contends in a recently filed lawsuit. He is accusing Hamilton of systemic racism and is seeking punitive damages.