Indian-Origin Professor Sues US College For Racial Discrimination

New York: 

An Indian-origin associate professor at the Wellesley business school, Massachusetts has filed a lawsuit alleging that she was subjected to racial and gender discrimination, according to a media report.

Lakshmi Balachandra, associate professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College alleged she lost career opportunities and faced economic losses, emotional distress, and harm to her reputation because of mistreatment and administrators’ failure to investigate her concerns, The Boston Globe newspaper reported on February 27.

Lakshmi Balachandra joined Babson’s faculty in 2012 and earned tenure in 2019.In her lawsuit, she called out Andrew Corbett, a professor and former chair of the college’s entrepreneurship division, as the “primary direct perpetrators of the discriminatory work environment.” According to the complaint filed in US District Court in Boston dated February 27, Lakshmi Balachandra alleged that Corbett, who oversaw teaching assignments, class scheduling, and annual reviews, only allowed her to teach required courses in entrepreneurship despite her requests to teach electives – even though she had taught such classes previously at MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School.