The Right’s drive to Make America White Again reared its pointed, pillowcase-covered head again Tuesday in the form of a lawsuit against Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law claiming that the school discriminates against white men by hiring too many women and nonwhite faculty.
Leaning on last year’s Supreme Court ruling outlawing race-based affirmative action in student admissions at Harvard and UNC Chapel Hill, the lawsuit claims that Northwestern is letting inferior specimens of humanity teach law when it should instead hire white men who are better in every way, as Inside Higher Education reports:
“For decades, left-wing faculty and administrators have been thumbing their noses at federal anti-discrimination statutes … by hiring women and racial minorities with mediocre and undistinguished records over white men who have better credentials, better scholarship, and better teaching ability,” the suit claims.
The suit is aghast that out of the 21 most recent faculty hires, only three were white men, which kind of makes us wonder why the count ended at 21.
In one of the more interesting notes in the Inside Higher Ed piece, we learn that “An addendum to the lawsuit notes that none of the rejected job candidates named in the suit was involved in the filing.” But that’s no reason to prevent unrelated schmucks from being all aggrieved on their behalf, and as we learned from the Supremes last year, you can have standing to sue over purely hypothetical discrimination now.
The suit is the latest exercise in rightwing culture wars shit-flinging from former Texas solicitor general Jonathan H. Mitchell, who came up with Texas’s abortion bounty-hunter law as a way to avoid judicial review, and who has a glorious record of terrible Supreme Court victories. Mitchell was one of the attorneys who argued for overturning Roe v. Wade in the 2022 Dobbs case, argued to reverse Colorado’s removal of Donald Trump from the 2024 ballot, and most recently helped make bump stocks available to all would-be mass shooters again.
Mitchell is suing on behalf of a very real group that he didn’t just make up for the purpose of the lawsuit, “Faculty, Alumni and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences” (FASORP). Heck, change it to “Faculty, Alumni, Students, and Citizens Opposed to Preferences” and it’d be FASC OP.
The lawsuit itself is full of pissy rhetoric like the above, apparently aimed more at Fox News producers than federal judges, although the distinction in some jurisdictions may be moot. Another f’rinstance, and we can’t help but think that Mitchell must have giggled to himself at his clever double entendre in the final line.
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.
Yes, dude, we see what you did there. Go fuck yourself.
As the Washington Post reports, the lawsuit
names three White men it says were not hired despite strong qualifications, and names four Black women and one Black man who it alleges were offered faculty positions because of their race and/or gender, painting several of these academics in harshly unflattering terms.
Again, a reminder: None of those who were passed over are parties to the lawsuit. Mitchell claims that his very real club of plaintiffs nonetheless has standing because it has “members who are ready and able to apply for entry-level and lateral faculty positions at Northwestern University’s law school,” where they will no doubt be rejected for being white guys, or utterly unqualified but you know that means “white.”
The Post said most of the professors named in the suit — not as defendants, but as evidence that people were hired primarily on the basis of race or gender, not their qualifications — declined to reply to inquiries, but that Paul Gowder went on the record to dispute the claim:
“This is absolute racist garbage,” he said in an interview, making clear that he was speaking for himself and not the law school or the university. “My record speaks for itself. I would gleefully put it up against the records of any of the people who were supposedly passed over.”
The lawsuit frequently alleges that various faculty hires were made solely on the basis of the candidates’ race or gender, but it’s pretty short on specifics, including a claim that “It was made clear to the Northwestern faculty that the law school had to hire a black woman for this position,” and that if the candidate in that example wasn’t approved by a faculty vote, “then the law school would have to hire a black woman later who would almost certainly be worse.”
The Black woman candidate, the complaint claims, “would not have been considered for a faculty appointment at Northwestern if she had been white or a member of a different race,” and was hired “over white male candidates who had records demonstrating that they were vastly more capable and qualified than she was.”
No, the complaint doesn’t offer any evidence that she was less qualified; guess you’ll just have to wait until the trial or the Fox News interview.
And as the New York Times points out, some of the candidates are described in not terribly subtle racist terms, although the Times settles for the far daintier term “language that could be seen as racially coded.”
For a few of the candidates, the lawsuit claims that they lacked scholarship or did not understand material. It accuses one professor of using an exam hypothetical from a publicly available source because she was “too lazy to write her own exam question.”
Also too, WaPo also points out that by complete coincidence, Tuesday’s filing of the lawsuit coincided with “the 60th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act,” although Mitchell said the timing was just a coincidence, haw haw haw.
Jesus fuck, this is what our courts have come to, happy America Day tomorrow, barf.
Supreme Court’s Dobbs Decision Is SO BAD (How Bad Is It?) That It’s Really Really Really Fucking Bad
[Inside Higher Education / WaPo / NYT / ]
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