Judge dismisses applicant's lawsuit

A federal judge last month dismissed a New York woman's largely incoherent lawsuit that claimed the University and eight other schools unfairly denied her admission. Judge Gerhard Gesell said in his decision that the plaintiff, Maria Sierotowicz, did not establish that the schools had discriminated against her and failed to show that she has a constitutional right to an education. Gesell said he dismissed the case also because there was "no common valid issue" linking the defendant schools together besides the plaintiff's admissions denials. In addition to the University, the defendant schools included three campuses of the City University of New York, American University, George Washington University, Howard University, Trinity College in Washington, D.C., the University of the District of Columbia, Georgetown University and La Salle University. Associate General Counsel Neil Hamburg said yesterday that he was pleased with the judge's order, adding he was confident all along that the suit would be dismissed. Sierotowicz could not be reached for comment last night. Acting as her own lawyer, Sierotowicz filed a grammatically flawed, 16-page complaint in October that accused the schools of malversations, frauds and denying her the right to "have a money, to settle own family." But although Sierotowicz filed several complaints with the U.S. Department of Education alleging the schools discriminated against her, Gesell ruled that the plaintiff never specified the nature of the discrimination. Gesell noted in his decision that the Education Department rejected each of her "so-called civil rights claims relating to denial of enrollment," and added that in each of her complaints "no claim is even suggested, let alone stated." Sierotowicz also contended in the suit that some of the schools violated her constitutional right to an education, a claim which Gesell flatly rejected. "The constitutional claim is, no doubt sincere, but frivolous as a matter of law," the judge wrote. "There is no constitutional right to a free, or indeed any type of education, let alone a higher education . . . ." In the suit, Sierotowicz demanded that top University administrators be imprisoned for life and that the University be shut down. According to papers filed in court by the University, the University rejected Sierotowicz's transfer application from CUNY in 1990 largely because of poor grades on her transcript, including several C's and two D's. The papers said the average successful University transfer has a college grade point average of 3.5. The University also claimed Sierotowicz's application essays were "so incomprehensible and irrelevant that they raised doubts about her comprehension of the English language and further undermined the quality of her application."

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