A new lawsuit has accused Northwestern University of allowing deans, faculty committees and editors of the school's law review publication of intentionally blocking white male scholars and professors from landing positions in Northwestern's Pritzker School of Law allegedly to fulfill their desire to hire professors who are black, female, gay or transgender, even when those others are "mediocre and undistinguished" when compared to more accomplished white male candidates.
On July 2, an organization known as Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) filed suit against Northwestern in Chicago federal court. The organization asserts to represent faculty and other members who joined together "for the purpose of restoring meritocracy in academia and fighting race and sex preferences that subordinate academic merit to so-called diversity considerations."
Other defendants named in the action include Pritzker School of Law Dean Hari Osofsky; Northwestern law professors Sarah Lawsky, Janice Nadler and Daniel Rodriguez; Dheven Unni, identified as editor in chief of the Northwestern University Law Review; and Jazmyne Denman, identified as senior equity and inclusion editor of the Northwestern University Law Review.
Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law Dean Hari Osofsky
| X.com
In the complaint, FASORP asserts Northwestern has for years followed a pattern established in American colleges and universities, where "left-wing faculty and administrators have been thumbing their noses at federal anti-discrimination statutes and openly discriminating on account of race and sex when appointing professors."
"They do this by hiring women and racial minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men who have better credentials, better scholarship, and better teaching ability," FASORP said in its complaint.
The lawsuit was allegedly filed on behalf of three unidentified tenured white male professors at other law schools who assert discriminatory hiring practices at Northwestern leave them unable to even be fairly considered or interviewed on an equal basis for faculty positions in the prestigious Pritzker School of Law.
The lawsuit notes that Northwestern has even passed over well known white male candidates with stellar academic credentials.
These allegedly included Eugene Volokh, a "prolific and internationally renowned legal scholar whose academic works, especially on the First Amendment, are often cited by litigants, courts, and scholars." Volokh clerked for former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor; and
Ernie Young, also a "famous and distinguished legal scholar" who has "published many influential works in the nation's leading law journals" and who clerked for former Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter.
The complaint notes that the accomplishments of both Volokh and Young "exceed those of nearly every professor currently on the Northwestern Law School faculty."
Both men, however, were allegedly rejected out of hand by then Law School Dean Rodriguez and other members of the faculty appointment committees because they were white males.
Neither Volokh nor Young are plaintiffs attached to the lawsuit, according to the complaint.
Instead, the complaint asserts the Pritzker Law School has consistently chosen to hire "patently unqualified professors" simply because those professors are black, female, gay or transgender.
The complaint points to the hiring of four black professors, including three who were women, identified as Destiny Peery, Candice Player, Paul Gowder and Jamelia Morgan.
The complaint claims all of those faculty appointments were essentially chosen primarily because of their race or sex, or both, and came over concerns expressed by Northwestern faculty about their academic depth and credentials.
Further, the complaint asserts dissenters were forced into line by deans and others in the faculty, who allegedly threatened to withhold bonuses and allegedly told dissenters that only black candidates would be considered for those positions.
And the complaint asserts that after they were hired, none of those professors distinguished themselves.
Player, for instance, "struggled in the classroom, and admitted to colleagues that she did not understand the material she was teaching and couldn't handle the students' questions." She later departed from the law school in 2019 after students allegedly exposed her for plagiarizing "an exam hypothetical from another source, because Player was too lazy to write her own exam question."
Peery also departed from Northwestern, the complaint claims, after she was quietly warned not to pursue tenure, because she was allegedly not qualified. According to the complaint, Peery then allegedly accused the school of racism, "pretending that she was a victim of race and sex discrimination when racial preferences were the very reason she was hired in the first place."
Both Peery and Player have "failed to obtain another academic appointment after leaving Northwestern, despite the overwhelming discriminatory preferences that black women receive on the academic hiring market," FASORP's lawsuit says.
The complaint notes that since 2021, the university has extended faculty job offers to 21 candidates. Of those, only three have been extended to white male candidates. But of those three, the complaint said, two went to white male candidates in tax law, a "high-demand, low-supply field" in which very few minority or female candidates are available, and one of those was a "sham" offer, extended to a white male candidate who administrators knew already had offers from the University of Chicago and Stanford, both more prestigious schools than Northwestern.
The other offer to a white male student was extended to a professor candidate with pre-existing ties to Northwestern, who was allegedly already well known and liked by Northwestern faculty, who had co-authored a study "claiming that race and sex preferences on student-run law reviews" benefit women and minorities. This "delighted the affirmative-action devotees and leftist ideologues on Northwestern's faculty and enabled him to earn their support despite his status as a white man," the complaint said.
The complaint further asserts white males have faced discrimination at Northwestern from the student editors of the school's Law Review, who have routinely sought to appoint black, female, gay and transgender members and editors and to promote scholarly articles authored by black, female, gay and transgender students.
They said the Law Review promotes such articles "while rejecting far better articles written by white men."
The lawsuit asserts the Law Review encourages authors to submit "personal statements" with their work, allegedly to allow editors to determine the race, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity of the authors and "to discriminate against white men."
The lawsuit claims the Law Review in 2023-2024 published an entire issue devoted entirely to "articles written by black women." That issue further did not disclose "that only articles written by black women were considered for publication, making it appear as though the normal selection process was used and that those authors earned their placement in the Northwestern University Law Review by writing better scholarship than the articles that were rejected."
"The student editors and members on the Law Review were told that this was done intentionally to promote the careers of these black women academics because of their race and sex," the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit asserts Northwestern's conduct has violated federal civil rights law which bars discrimination on the basis of race and sex, even if such discrimination is targeted at white males.
The lawsuit asks the court to issue an injunction blocking Northwestern from continuing to allegedly engage in such discrimination and ordering the school to establish new faculty-selection and Law Review selection policies that are "based entirely on academic and scholarly merit and that explicity disavows any consideration of race, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity or expression."
They are seeking the appointment of a court monitor to oversee such potential orders.
FASORP is represented in the action by attorneys Jonathan F. Mitchell, of Mitchell Law PLLC, of Austin, Texas; Judd E. Stone II, Christopher D. Hilton and Ari Cuenin, of Stone Hilton PLLC, of Austin, Texas; Gene P. Hamilton, of the America First Legal Foundation, of Washington, D.C.
In response to the lawsuit, a Northwestern spokesperson issued a statement to The Cook County Record, saying:
"Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is among the top law schools in the country, and we are proud of their outstanding faculty. We intend to vigorously defend this case."