Lawsuit against Northwestern for anti-white, anti-male hiring reads like DEI horror story

A new lawsuit against Northwestern University has been filed alleging discrimination, this time against white males who were candidates as professors at the university’s law school.

Accusations of falsifying publication records for minority professors seeking tenure, improperly pressuring instructors to increase grades for favored minorities, threats to withhold staff bonuses if they don’t vote to hire unqualified minority candidates and other questionable practices litter the lawsuit filed against the school.

Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences (FASORP) filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois to stop “Northwestern’s discriminatory faculty-hiring practices and expose the corrupt faculty and administrators who enable and perpetuate these violations of federal law.”

“This is the first of many lawsuits that will be filed against universities that refuse to implement colorblind and sex-neutral faculty-hiring practices. Our client [FASORP] has standing to sue any university we want, and any professor who has incriminating evidence should reach out to us.” said Jonathan F. Mitchell, the lead counsel in the case.

Northwestern said the university would “vigorously defend” itself.  

“Northwestern Pritzker School of Law is among the top law schools in the country, and we are proud of their outstanding faculty,” a spokesperson said in a statement, according to the Washington Post.  

The school is named after Illinois’ current governor, Democrat J.B. Pritzker and his wife, M.K. Pritzker, who made a $100 million donation to the law school.  

The suit says that since 2012, then-Dean Daniel Rodriguez at the law school followed a mandate to exclude white men from the faculty in order to hire minorities. The policies have continued under the current dean, Hari M. Osofsky.  

Rodriguez and Osofsky, along with Northwestern, are included as defendants in the case.  

Also included as defendants are Sarah Lawsky and Janice Nadler, in their official capacities as professors of law at Northwestern University; Dheven Unni, in his official capacity as editor in chief of the Northwestern University Law Review; and Jazmyne Denman, in her official capacity as senior equity and inclusion editor of the Northwestern University Law Review. 

The suit alleges that Rodriguez knew that his discriminatory hiring scheme was illegal, so he instructed staff members not to discuss candidates over the faculty listserv.  

“[Rodriguez] explicitly mentioned litigation risk as his reason for banning listserv discussions of faculty candidates,” says the suit.  

The suit also alleges several ethically questionable, if not illegal, practices that resulted in the hiring of unqualified candidates. 

One such candidate, Destiny Peery, a black woman who graduated from Northwestern Law School “near the bottom of her class,” was hired because Rodriguez “threatened to withhold bonuses from any faculty member who would vote against Peery or attempt to thwart her appointment,” says FASORP. 

The lawsuit also says that Peery was groomed for the professorship, with mentors – including law professor Janice Nadler – pressuring instructors to inflate her grades. 

Three years after she was hired, Nadler then allegedly lied to the promotion committee about Peery’s publication track record, which was also substandard. She instead submitted chapters of Peery’s previously completed PhD dissertation. 

“When Nadler’s colleagues on the faculty learned of her deception, they were incensed,” says the suit.  

Eventually, Peery was denied tenure, claimed “racism” after the denial and “failed to obtain an academic appointment elsewhere,” after leaving the school.   

In another case, Candice Player, who was hired by the law school, “admitted to colleagues that she did not understand the material she was teaching and couldn’t handle the students’ questions.”  

She also plagiarized at least one test question, which students recognized from a publicly available source, says the lawsuit. 

The suit alleges case after case of racial or sexual minorities receiving preferential treatment solely based on identity, including a $900,000 annual budget from Northwestern for another minority with questionable qualifications, Jamelia Morgan, to start the “Center for Racial and Disability Justice.” 

So far, the center has produced no scholarship since Morgan was hired in 2022, and just two events. The website’s event page is blank, according to the suit.  

The lawsuit calls Morgan “an affirmative action hire who never deserved her appointment in the first place.”  

Tables in the lawsuit detailing candidate interviews from the last three years show that of the 21 offers made to candidates, only three offers were made to white men.  

Of the three, one candidate already had tenure at Stanford and had an offer from the University of Chicago, both of which are more highly rated than Northwestern; one was a tax law specialist, of whom there is a shortage, and one was a Northwestern graduate who wrote glowingly about affirmative action. 

The Stanford professor declined the job. 

“The Northwestern faculty knew full well that [he] would reject their offer. But they extended him an offer for the sole purpose of making their policy of discriminating against white men seem somewhat less obvious to someone who simply examines the numbers,” says the lawsuit.   

The suit highlights several highly qualified white men who Northwestern refused to consider for professorships, such as Eugene Volokh, Ernie Young and Ilan Wurman. 

The suit also alleges that the Northwestern University Law Review “give[s] discriminatory preferences to women, racial minorities, homosexuals, and transgender people when selecting their members and editors,” in violation of Title VI and Title IX. 

The plaintiffs are asking the court to force Northwestern to stop the discriminatory hiring practices, require the school to revise its policies to conform with the law, and appoint a court monitor to “oversee all decisions relating to the appointment, promotion, and compensation of faculty” and any diversity office at the university. 

“Federal law prohibits discriminating against any American citizen on the basis of race or sex –yet the pervasiveness and extent of such discrimination is the worst-kept secret in academia… Decisions need to be made based on merit and excellence alone, and we will fight for the rights of all Americans to be free from race and sex discrimination in the United States,” said Gene Hamilton, the executive director of America First Legal, which is assisting on the case.