According to a complaint filed by a former member of the Spanish department at Amherst College, “Teaching assistants … were encouraged to sleep with and socialize with students to boost enrollment.” The Washington Post reports:
Dimaris Barrios-Beltran, a former lecturer in the Spanish department at Amherst, claimed discrimination, retaliation, intentional infliction of emotional distress and wrongful termination in a lawsuit against Amherst and her former supervisor, Victoria Maillo. The suit describes her as becoming concerned soon after she was hired in 2012, which is when Barrios-Beltran claims Maillo told her she liked to find “pretty faces” online to hire as teaching assistants in order to attract more students to Spanish classes….
Early in 2013, Barrios-Beltran’s teaching assistant called her in tears, according to the lawsuit, saying that Maillo was treating her like a prostitute. The teaching assistant claimed that Maillo was angry that she was dating a student at the University of Massachusetts and told her and other teaching assistants to go to parties with students and sleep with them to encourage them to take Spanish. Barrios-Beltran claims that in frustration, the teaching assistant asked Maillo if she wanted her to sleep with a different guy every night like another teaching assistant was doing, and the teaching assistant told Barrios-Beltran that Maillo responded, “that is what I brought you here for.”
Barrios-Beltran spoke with other teaching assistants in the department who confirmed this, according to the lawsuit: “These young T.A.s believed they were being asked to prostitute themselves in order to increase enrollment in the Spanish Department.” …
Sarah A. Ornelas, one of the lawyers representing Barrios-Beltran, said several people supported her claims. “When you have allegations of these sorts I want to speak to all the witnesses before I go and lodge such a complaint. I did even more background investigating on my own.
“It is incredible what was going on over there.”
Amherst, a small private, highly selective liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts, has not yet filed a legal response to Barrios-Beltran’s lawsuit, filed in Superior Court in Massachusetts and first reported by the Daily Hampshire Gazette.