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  Trocaire Accused of Sexual, Age, Gender Bias

By Jay Tokasz
Buffalo News
August 2, 2010

http://www.buffalonews.com/city/article88318.ece

Trocaire College is being accused of discriminating against a faculty member who taught natural sciences and was fired in 2009.

The state Division of Human Rights has found “probable cause” that the Catholic college in South Buffalo discriminated against Dr. Csaba Marosan because of his age, gender, national origin and sexual orientation. The division also determined that the college may have retaliated against Marosan because of his original discrimination complaint.

The college, represented by attorney James Grasso, has denied any discrimination. College officials have said Marosan was let go after seven years because his medical degree doesn’t meet guidelines of the college’s accrediting association, the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools.

“What the college was doing was trying to improve its program,” Grasso said.

Grasso called the findings “inherently flawed and the result of a poor and incomplete investigation.”

The case will head to a public hearing before an administrative law judge, and Grasso predicted the college would prevail with a more complete unveiling of the evidence.

Marosan filed his initial complaint on April 7, 2009; he was let go on Dec. 18, 2009. He filed a second complaint on Feb. 16, 2010.

State investigators also said they found evidence that:

• There was “preferential treatment of homosexual males” at the college.

• The college wanted to terminate Marosan, a native of Hungary, because of his accent and because “he was not part of a clique of younger and/or homosexual males who socialized with administrators.”

• The college’s reason for terminating Marosan’s employment was a “pretext for unlawful discrimination.”

Grasso said those findings were based entirely on “innuendo,” because the college has never inquired about a person’s sexual orientation in hiring and “doesn’t make decisions based on that.”

Marosan, a former cancer researcher who had taught at Trocaire since 2002, told investigators he was treated differently because he is a 51-year-old heterosexual male, and his superiors were looking to hire young, gay men.

Marosan’s complaints paint a portrait of a scheming administration that sought to orchestrate a sexual harassment case against him based on false allegations, including a statement from a student who later admitted being “coached” by the college’s associate dean for academic affairs, the Rev. Robert Mock. The student ended up retracting the statement and saying Mock, a priest of the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo, had coerced him.

“Father Mock denies coercing any students to make [complaints] against complainant,” the Division of Human Rights investigators wrote in their report. “The evidence reveals that at least one student admits to being coached by Father Mock. into making a complaint.”

Grasso said the scenario involving a student who wrote a statement about Marosan and then retracted it had nothing to do with the sexual harassment complaints.

 
 

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