Today's Must Read

Paul Campos relates how he successfully prosecuted his discrimination against the University of Colorado Law School, getting a significant settlement from both the school, and its Dean, Critical Race Theory specialist  Lolita Buckner Inniss, (As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know.") hung themselves out to dry by admitting in various permanent media that they were discriminating, and that they did not care.

I’ve settled my lawsuit against my employer, the University of Colorado, and Lolita Buckner Inniss, the current dean of the law school, where I’ve been on the faculty for the past 34 years.

In the settlement agreement, the university denies having done anything wrong, but, as always, actions speak louder than words.   In addition to paying all of my legal fees from two years of litigation, the university paid me a substantial sum to not take the case to trial, removed Dean Inniss as my supervisor for whatever time may be left in her tenure as Dean, and made various other concessions regarding the conditions of my employment going forward. 

………

Part I of the story describes the sheer absurdity of a law school dean who claims to be an expert on discrimination in America responding to a report of such discrimination from a faculty member by insisting something like that couldn’t be happening at the institution she had arrived at eleven months earlier.  It lays out the astonishing professional incompetence Lolita Buckner Inniss displayed when she retaliated against me in such a blatant way that my own lawyer was literally incredulous when I told him about it, because he was certain no lawyer could ever be so careless as to send the self-damning email that the Dean sent me.  That documented retaliation made both this lawsuit and its costly resolution possible.

Part II is about how bureaucratic mechanisms, such as peer review committees, can be co-opted to shield from public view discrimination based on petty personal grudges, and clearly illegal sex discrimination.

Part III is about the consequences for someone inside a major research university when he tries to bring the gross financial mismanagement of his own school within that university to the attention of central university administrators, whose own negligence has allowed that mismanagement to go on for many years. 

………

Employment discrimination law in this country is extremely defendant-friendly.  It’s usually very hard for plaintiffs to prove that bad treatment from their employers was a product of illegal motives, and it’s also difficult in these cases to prove that the employer is liable for enough damages to make these cases worth pursuing.  And of course people don’t want to sue their employers because they want to keep their jobs.

Because of academic tenure, I’m in an unusually privileged position in regard to the last factor, but like most employees who sue their employers for discrimination, I was still going to have trouble proving that I was being treated badly for illegal as opposed to legal reasons, and to prove just what damages I’d incurred as a result.

This is where Dean Inniss inadvertently came to my legal rescue. She engaged in a series of egregious retaliatory acts after my lawyer sent the university a letter putting it on notice that we were considering filing a lawsuit.  First, she kicked me off an important committee that I had worked to get assigned to precisely because remaining on it was critical to my professional advancement.  In an email she told me she was kicking me off the committee because I was complaining about being discriminated against.  After I complained to her about this retaliation, she removed me from teaching a class because I was purportedly making racist and sexist statements in that class.  My lawyer then let the university know that the law school had complete recordings of the class in question, which we had reviewed in detail, and which no one at the law school had ever even looked at.  This pretty much put an end to that rationale, and revealed it for what it was: a libelous pretext for continuing to punish me for having reported the dean’s discrimination in the first place.

It really is a complete mind-f%$# just how incompetent, and how petty this all is, particularly given that the Dean is (allegedly) an expert in discrimination related law.

This exceeds my wildest expectations, and given my existing views on the academy, that is a pretty high bar to clear.

See also parts II and parts III of his adventures with academe.