Judge Allows Former HBS Professor’s Lawsuit Alleging Harvard Mishandled Tenure Review to Proceed

A judge rejected Harvard’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit by former Harvard Business School associate professor Benjamin G. Edelman ’02 in a ruling on Monday.

Edelman, who was a tenure-track professor at HBS from 2007 to 2018, sued Harvard in 2023, alleging the University mishandled his tenure review process and unfairly denied him tenure at the school.

Edelman became the subject of public controversy in 2014 after he engaged in a dispute with a Brookline Chinese restaurant that overcharged him $4 as part of a $57.35 bill. In his lawsuit, Edelman alleged that the incident with the Chinese restaurant factored into Harvard’s decision to wrongly deny him tenure at the Business School.

Judge Hélene Kazanjian’s ruling on Monday preserved all three counts of the lawsuits and stated that if Edelman’s allegations are true, Harvard may have breached its contract with him.

As such, Kazanjian allowed the case to move forward to discovery, the process by which Harvard and Edelman can obtain information related to the case to “determine whether the review process met reasonable expectations.”

“My lawsuit is about following the rules,” Edelman said in an interview on Monday. “HBS has a policy for investigating faculty, and I want nothing more nor less than for that policy to be followed the way it was written.”

In discovery, Edelman will receive access to the evidence gathered during the tenure review process, which Edelman says he was entitled to under the original policy.

“I’m particularly looking forward to discovery because Harvard has withheld so much information from me,” Edelman wrote in a statement published on his website.

“I will demand the entire corpus from which these quotes were taken,” Edelman added, referring to anonymous quotes presented as evidence an internal HBS report which he said impugned his character.

“With this information, I will no longer have to speculate about what these speakers might have been talking about,” Edelman wrote. “At long last, I will be able to say for sure — putting me on track to defend myself in substance and without resorting to hypotheticals.”

An HBS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The case is one of multiple employment-related lawsuits HBS is currently facing.

Embattled Business Administration professor Francesca Gino has alleged similar treatment, claiming that Harvard invented a new policy specifically to target her after she became the subject of data fraud allegations. She is currently suing Harvard and a data investigation blog for $25 million.

Edelman pointed to deeper flaws in the Business School’s administration as the underlying cause of his suit.

“HBS, on its face, appears to be a very well-run place,” Edelman said. “But underneath this facade of how beautiful and perfect HBS is there’s this slightly unpleasant undercurrent of things that are not quite right, that are broken.”

“Following their own policies is one of those broken things,” he added.

—Staff writer Benjamin Isaac can be reached at benjamin.isaac@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @benjaminisaac_1.