Category: Pennsylvania News

A former Villanova professor says in a federal lawsuit filed this week she was fired from the Catholic university after accusing its law school of racial discrimination involving one of her students.

Stephanie Sena, who had been an anti-poverty fellow in the law school and taught at Villanova for more than 20 years, was dismissed in 2024 for what the school said were “student complaints,” according to the lawsuit.

But Sena’s lawyers say the dismissal was due to her filing an ethics complaint against the school for racial discrimination for comments that administrators made around a decision not to give her student a financial award that would have alleviated her debt, citing a speech the student made at a law school symposium.

The student, Antionna Fuller, accused Villanova of racial discrimination and failing to appropriately support her with financial aid during a 2021 symposium speech at the university, titled “Shifting the Poverty Lens: Caritas in Focus.” Sena hosted the symposium, during which Fuller also publicly asked for an apology from Villanova.

“How can you say caritas [which means love and charity in Latin] and Black lives matter with no thought to a Black life in front of you, systematically oppressed by your hands?” Fuller said, according to a video of the speech. “It’s not only hypocritical, but it’s embarrassing. We cannot talk about oppression and white supremacy without acknowledging its very presence here.”

Her speech drew a standing ovation, but later caused consternation among law school leadership.

Sena found out that law school dean Mark Alexander, in a letter to the scholarship committee, asked that Fuller not receive the debt relief award because she “maliciously maligned” the law school, according to the suit.

Sena‘s lawsuit alleges that then-law school vice dean Michael Risch said after the student’s speech that the student was “lucky” to have gotten into the law school and that she would not be there if she were white.

Villanova said in a statement Wednesday that Sena’s lawsuit “lacks merit” and that the university “will vigorously defend against these baseless allegations.”

“We look forward to presenting the actual facts surrounding the plaintiff’s separation from Villanova. To be clear, Villanova University does not tolerate discrimination or retaliation of any kind, and the allegations in Plaintiff’s lawsuit are contrary to our written policies and conflict with the core values of our University.”

Sena, 46, of Media, declined to comment.

Fuller, 29, who now lives with her mother in the South, said in an interview Wednesday that she feels both relieved and anxious about seeing the issue aired publicly.

“I am happy, at least relieved, that truth is coming out,” said Fuller, who graduated summa cum laude from the University of South Carolina and got her Villanova law degree in 2022. “I’ve been in such an isolated place and just carrying this trauma for so long.”

She said she sought therapy after the reaction she got to her speech from Villanova administrators and last year wrote a book, I Almost Sued My Law School, about her journey as a first-generation, low-income Black student. She no longer wants to practice law, she said, and is still figuring out her next steps.

But she said she was grateful to Sena, whom, during the symposium speech, she called “my hero, advocate, and my friend.”

“She was the first person to publicly stand up for me,” Fuller said.

Fallout from symposium speech

Sena, a longtime activist who has worked to help people experiencing homelessness and opened a homeless shelter in Upper Darby in 2022, was fired in 2016 from her job as an adjunct professor at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts after defending students who accused a classmate of rape. She sued PAFA and the case ended in a confidential settlement.

She also led activists in lawsuits against the city in 2021 over its intentions to remove homeless people in a Kensington encampment. In 2023, the head of Norristown’s municipal council planned to bus homeless people to Villanova’s campus because of Sena’s advocacy for the homeless in Norristown. Villanova at the time was criticized for not defending Sena and making a stronger response.

Sena was hired to teach at Villanova in 2003 and began to work at the law school in 2020, serving as a full-time faculty member and anti poverty fellow. She was also an adjunct professor at Villanova’s Center for Peace and Justice.

In her lawsuit against Villanova, Sena asserts that law school leadership met with her in 2022, several months after Fuller’s symposium speech, and asked her if she had known what Fuller planned to say. Matthew Saleh, former assistant dean for admissions, told her it would be harder to attract Black students to the school because of the speech, according to the suit. Risch, the vice dean, made the comment about Fuller not being at Villanova if she had been white, the suit says.

Saleh, who now is the senior associate dean of enrollment management and financial aid at Rutgers’ law school, said in an interview that he does not recall making that comment and that he doesn’t think it’s even the case that Fuller’s speech would hurt recruiting.

“That would not have even come to my mind,” he said. “I couldn’t reasonably see a way that it would impact recruiting.”

Sena “objected to the race discriminatory and retaliatory comments” made to her in that meeting, according to the suit.

In October 2023, she complained again about the comments in an email to two administrators who headed diversity, equity, and inclusion at Villanova, according to the lawsuit complaint. Then came the award committee meeting on Jan. 30, 2024, where the dean in a letter argued against Fuller’s receiving the award, according to the suit.

Students who were in the award committee meeting and were upset about the law school dean’s reaction approached Sena and asked what they could do, according to the suit. Sena said the students, who are not named in her lawsuit, could contact the diversity, equity, and inclusion office and file a climate complaint.

Sena, according to the suit, complained again one day after the award committee meeting that Villanova “had engaged in a dangerous pattern of race discrimination” and filed an ethics complaint with the university. She also expressed her concerns in an email to faculty and in a meeting with a law professor, who told her the students had committed an ethics violation by revealing confidential details of the awards meeting they were in, according to the suit.

After filing the complaint, Sena said in her lawsuit, she was “treated differently,” “unjustly criticized,” and “blamed for issues outside her control.”

In June 2024, human resources informed her that she was under investigation after students said she had pressured them to file complaints against the deans, which Sena denied, the suit said.

She was fired July 30, 2024, even though, the suit said, she had no prior performance or disciplinary issues and had received awards and promotions. She is seeking damages including economic loss, compensatory and punitive, and attorneys’ fees and costs.

An apology and acknowledgement

During the symposium, Fuller had said she wished Villanova would apologize and acknowledge what happened. She said that the school had given her $15,000 in financial aid toward her annual $65,000 cost, but that she subsequently learned other students had gotten more, even though her mother worked multiple jobs as a nurse’s aide to support the family.

“I was confused,” she told the audience. “How can a student with seemingly the most need graduate with the most debt?”

She learned of a free-tuition public interest scholarship that Villanova awards to incoming students and sought it after she was enrolled, she said. She was turned down repeatedly, she said, even though Villanova had recently awarded its largest group of the scholarships.

“Am I invisible?” she asked. “To walk into this law school building every day, to be surrounded by wealth and prestige, while struggling and burdened with debt, and while expected to perform like those who are not feels inhumane.”

She said during the speech she would graduate with almost $200,000 in student debt. Villanova officials, she said Wednesday, later accused her of exaggerating because she was including her undergraduate debt, too, and maintained that the total was really $160,000 — $126,000 of which was from the law school.

Fuller said Wednesday she had apologized to law school leadership, hugged them at graduation, and thought everything had been resolved. She said she was surprised to hear that the dean wanted to block her access to the debt award, she said.

“My intent wasn’t to harm, attack or mislead,” Fuller wrote in her book, “but to share my personal experience — my fears and financial anxieties — as part of the larger conversation about finding solutions to reduce poverty, which the conference was centered around.”

Staff writer Abraham Gutman contributed to this article.