Dartmouth fired her one day after approving her course, professor says

According to the filing, Williams was hired in July 2023 on a two-year postdoctoral fellowship that was set to convert into a tenure-track assistant professor role. The complaint says that conversion never happened. On May 29, 2025 – one day after Dartmouth finally approved a course she had spent months trying to put on the schedule – the Dean of Faculty terminated her appointment, effective June 30, 2025. 

Named as individual defendants are history department chair Darrin McMahon, Associate Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies Matthew Delmont, Associate Dean of Social Sciences Benjamin Valentino, and Dean of Faculty Elizabeth Smith. 

The complaint alleges the conduct started early. Williams says McMahon told her in an October 11, 2023 meeting that he saw her as a “daughter” and himself as a “father figure” – language the filing describes as setting up an unequal, gendered dynamic. According to the complaint, McMahon also made sexually inappropriate comments at a department dinner the following week, including a story about an exchange student. 

The course-scheduling dispute is the operational core of the case. Williams says she confirmed her Spring 2025 teaching plans five times, through emails, the department’s official scheduling form, and the curriculum committee. The complaint alleges that when McMahon returned from leave, he ignored nearly a year of approvals and ran the course through a bureaucratic process designed to keep it off the spring schedule. The filing says Delmont and Valentino joined in, repeatedly pressing Williams on questions she had already answered. Williams says she changed her personal cell phone number on January 23, 2025 because of the volume of contact. 

The annual review is the second pillar. The complaint alleges McMahon’s May 6, 2025 review called her work “inadequate” and said it failed to “meet minimum expectations.” The filing says the review left out a book review accepted in the American Historical Review, a Huntington Library fellowship, an essay commissioned through a California National Park grant, and four articles completed and submitted in the publication pipeline. The complaint says McMahon never requested a meeting with Williams about the review, despite a Faculty Handbook requirement to do so. Williams alleges Dartmouth then denied her the grievance procedures available to tenure-track faculty and unilaterally treated her appointment as probationary, a characterization she says is not in her contract.