The chief diversity officer at Medgar Evers College claims she was abused and bullied by former NYC Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew — the college’s president — then fired.
Sylvia Kinard — the ex-wife of former city Comptroller Bill Thompson, now the chairman of the CUNY board of trustees — said Crew became irate over her handling of a dispute between two staffers at the Brooklyn CUNY school, according to a discrimination suit she filed in Brooklyn federal court against Crew and the college.
Kinard, the administrator in charge of handling discrimination cases, claims Crew went ballistic after she forwarded the staffers’ discrimination/harassment complaints outside Medgar Evers to be reviewed by CUNY’s central administration in April 2018.
The day after forwarding the complaints, Kinard said Crew angrily quizzed her about why she attended that morning’s personnel and budget committee meeting.
“His stance was physically aggressive and his tone verbally abusive,” Kinard says in court papers. “He was clearly trying to bully me.”
Later that day, Crew led Kinard back into the meeting and asked her “hostile and leading questions” about her presence at the morning session.
“Crew repeatedly waved around his cellphone” and “screamed” at a faculty member he thought invited her, Kinard claims.
Sixteen days after the meeting, Kinard, who had worked at the school since 2004, received a letter saying she would not be reappointed. Her 2018 salary was $117,120.
Crew sent her a memo the same day saying she had failed to provide required Title IX training documentation for the sports program. He also noted she sometimes demonstrated “an uncooperative” approach to her job, court papers say.
Kinard filed the federal lawsuit after she complained to CUNY but their internal probe found she was not discriminated against, records show.
Documents obtained by the Post show Kinard was previously admonished by the US Department of Education over her handling of a student’s discrimination complaint and that Crew had raised issues about her not handing in her time sheets.
Kinard and the college’s legal officer declined to comment.