“I’ve got so many strikes against me that it’s hard to know which one,” he said. “I’m over 50. I’m white. I’m male. I’m right of center politically. None of these things are good. And I don’t have a Ph.D. in another discipline, which is a big hiring trend. But, you know, I’ve got a job at a really good law school.”
The complaint goes into considerable detail about several faculty hires at Northwestern, apparently relying on insider accounts, and includes 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.”
At least two of the hires did not receive tenure and are no longer on the law school faculty.
The lawsuit also claims there was some horse-trading during the 2019-2020 hiring cycle. It says the law school dean at the time struck a deal with Steven Calabresi, a Northwestern professor who helped found the conservative Federalist Society, to support hiring a Federalist Society member in exchange for supporting the candidacies of a Black professor at the University of Iowa, Paul Gowder, and another professor’s wife.
The Federalist Society candidate was a gay white man, so he would pass muster, the complaint says. But he ultimately was not hired after an associate dean and some of her colleagues objected to hiring a white man, the suit says.
Mr. Gowder, now a professor at Northwestern, said Tuesday that he had “no idea of any kind of a deal,” but that he had ample credentials for the job. He graduated from Harvard Law before his 21st birthday and was a civil rights lawyer with a law degree and a Ph.D. when he was hired at Iowa. He won a $100,000 grant for his third book, he said, and his résumé lists more than 40 publications of various kinds.
Mr. Calabresi, the Federalist Society founder, did not respond to requests for comment.
Alain Delaquérière and Kitty Bennett contributed research.