If you don’t recognize the name FASORP, you soon will. FASORP—whose full name is Faculty, Alumni, & Students Opposed to Racial Preferences—is a voluntary membership organization that litigates against race and sex preferences in academia. On its behalf, Jonathan Mitchell has just filed the first of what will likely be a long series of lawsuits against major universities.
In the introduction to its complaint against Northwestern University, FASORP observes:
For decades, 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….
University faculty and administrators think they can flout these anti-discrimination statutes with impunity because they are rarely sued over their discriminatory hiring practices and the Department of Education looks the other way. But now the jig is up. The Supreme Court is no longer willing to indulge affirmative-action exceptions to the unambiguous textual commands of Title VI, Title IX, and 42 U.S.C. § 1981.
FASORP’s complaint alleges that Northwestern University’s law school has long used race and sex preferences in hiring faculty, and it offers lots of examples. Here’s one:
21. Northwestern’s hiring mandate has led to the hiring of patently unqualified professors. Destiny Peery, a black female who graduated from Northwestern Law School near the bottom of her class, was hired in 2014 as a tenure-track professor at Northwestern Law School—even though the faculty at Northwestern was fully aware of her abysmal academic record as a student at the law school. Several faculty members expressed concerns that Peery was unqualified for an academic appointment and incapable of producing serious scholarship.
22. But then-Dean Dan Rodriguez, during a faculty meeting, threatened to withhold bonuses from any faculty member who would vote against Peery or attempt to thwart her appointment. At Northwestern, a professor’s fixed salary constitutes only 2/3 or 3/4 of his or her total compensation; the remainder is paid as a bonus that is entirely at the discretion of the dean. The opposition to Peery crumbled in response to these threats from the dean….
29. Peery (unsurprisingly) had written almost nothing during her first three years as a tenure-track professor. Yet when [Janice] Nadler presented Peery’s case to the faculty [for mid-tenure review], she falsely claimed that Peery had produced several new publications since she had been hired. It turned out that all but one of these “new” papers had been written before Peery’s appointment at Northwestern, and consisted mostly of chapters from Peery’s Ph.D. dissertation. Peery’s initial appointment to Northwestern had already been based on that work, and pre-appointment work cannot be considered or used to justify retention or promotion. When Nadler’s colleagues on the faculty learned of her deception, they were incensed….
31. After Nadler was confronted with her dishonest portrayal of Peery’s publication record, Nadler changed her tune and tried to excuse Peery’s failure to produce scholarship by claiming that Peery was too busy doing institutional work. Nadler also blamed then-Dean Dan Rodriguez for inviting Peery to participate in too many panels and presentations. At the faculty meeting on Peery’s promotion, several faculty members, including Dean Rodriguez, said that Peery had received so many invitations to panels and presentations because the law school desperately needed Peery to serve as the token black participant at these events, which left Peery with no time to write. The faculty then voted to promote Peery to associate professor, even though she had written almost nothing since her initial appointment to the faculty.
32. Two years after her promotion to associate professor, Peery still failed to produce any scholarship that could warrant a tenured appointment. At this time, Peery was gently told that she should not seek tenure. Peery then had the chutzpah to accuse Northwestern of racism for denying her tenure, 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.
Conversely, the complaint alleges, Northwestern law school refused to give serious consideration to hiring renowned scholars, such as Eugene Volokh, because they are white men.
FASORP also sues Northwestern over the race and sex discrimination that the student editors of its law review commit, both in selecting new classes of editors and in deciding which articles it will publish.
If you are a university faculty member, alumnus, or student opposed to race and sex preferences, you may join FASORP for free. If you have evidence of race or sex discrimination, you may use that same link to submit your evidence or you may email it to info@fasorp.org.