Federal District Court Judge Dismisses Yale Sex-Bias Case

A Federal District Court has dismissed a former undergraduate's lawsuit against Yale University for lacking appropriate procedures for handling sexual harassment complaints.

Pamela Price filed the lawsuit is 1976, claiming that a male professor had graded her unfairly because she refused to enter into a sexual relationship with him.

New Haven Federal District Court Judge Ellen B. Burns ruled, after examining the evidence, that no sexual proposition was made, that Price's course grade was not affected by anything other than an evaluation of her academic performance, and that the manner in which Yale dealt with the complaint, while ad hoc, was appropriate. William Doyle, attorney for Yale University, said yesterday.

Price, now a second year law student at the University of California at Berkeley, and her attorney were both unavailable for comment yesterday.

Harvard provides formal bureaucratic procedures for the redress of sexual harassment-related grievances, Judith Walzer, assistant dean for Coeducation, said yesterday.

Walzer, one of the authors of the procedures, said that they were written in 1977, when the press was publicizing the Price case.

Officials at Yale adopted a formal process for the redress of sexual-harassment grievances last year, Walzer added.