DEI Brings Kafka to My Law School – WSJ

While my opinions obviously ruffled some feathers on campus, I wasn t a pariah. My teaching evaluations are excellent, and my fall 2023 courses filled to capacity on the first day of registration this spring.

But this semester, for no apparent reason, ONU launched an investigation into me, without saying what it was about. My lawyers and I asked for specifics multiple times. ONU refused to provide them. Now, rather than level with me, ONU is demanding that I gamble the remainder of my career at a table where the administration holds all the cards. With my sudden free time, I rack my brain to think of rules I might have broken.

Perhaps decency is a sacrifice ONU is willing to make to grease the wheels of the DEI agenda. It looks like the law is, too. As my Academic Freedom Alliance-provided lawyer informed ONU, the attempt on April 14 to intimidate me into signing the release of claims with only a week s notice is an unambiguous violation of federal age-discrimination law, which requires that workers over 40 be given a minimum of 21 days to consider such offers. I m 62.

Moreover, insufficient collegiality isn t listed as adequate cause in ONU s faculty handbook for dismissing a tenured faculty member. The American Association of University Professors notified ONU in an April 19 letter, and again on May 2, that an absence of collegiality ought never, by itself, constitute a basis for nonreappointment, denial of tenure, or dismissal for cause. The university president informed AAUP that ONU will not be providing a response.

All of this is happening during the most successful year of my professional life. In addition to my teaching, which students appear to love and, more than anything else, I love teaching one of the world s most prestigious university presses is publishing my 10th book this summer, and I was reappointed to the Ohio Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. But as I learned as I was marched out of my classroom by men in uniform, dissenting from DEI can turn anyone into Josef K.

via www.wsj.com

Scott Gerber, law professor at Ohio Northern.

This all sounds familiar. Scott should listen to his lawyers and stick to his guns. If ONU fires him, then at least he’ll be able to sue them and hopefully get a big recovery that will make ONU think twice before it tries something like this again.