Three impressive, qualified, white male law professors applied to join the faculty of Northwestern School of Law. They were First Amendment expert (and Ethics Alarms favorite) Eugene Volokh, Ernest A. Young of Duke University’s Law School, and Ilan Wurman, a distinguished professor at The University of Minnesota Law School. All were rejected in favor of DEI hires, despite being objectively better qualified than the successful candidates. Now “Faculty, Alumni, and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences” (FASORP), a collective of professors and lawyers who seek to expose and stop racial and gender preferences in higher education, is suing on the professors’ behalf.
“As a result of the [DEI] mandate, Northwestern University School of Law refuses to even consider hiring white male faculty candidates with stellar credentials, while it eagerly hires candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records who check the proper diversity boxes,” the complaint alleges. Northwestern violates the law 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 says.
“But this is prohibited by federal law, which bans universities that accept federal funds from discriminating on account of race or sex. University faculty and administrators think they can flout these anti-discrimination statutes with impunity because they are rarely sued….But now the jig is up.”
The case of Volokh would seem to be particularly difficult to refute. The suit asserts that Volokh’s accomplishments exceed those of nearly every professor currently on the Northwestern Law School faculty, but because he is a white man and “neither homosexual nor transgender,” he was judged unacceptable.
The law suit says that appointing Professor Volokh was supported by many of Northwestern’s faculty, but the appointments committee chair Dan Rodriguez, who had championed race-based hiring as dean, refused to grant Professor Volokh an interview. “Candidates with mediocre and undistinguished records were interviewed and received offers because of their preferred demographic characteristics,” the lawsuit alleges.
Rodriguez appears to be what is technically known as “a piece of work.” He was behind the hiring of one black female law professor named Destiny Perry who had graduated from Northwestern Law School near the bottom of her class.
“Several faculty members expressed concerns that Peery was unqualified for an academic appointment and incapable of producing serious scholarship,” the lawsuit notes. “But then-Dean Dan Rodriguez, during a faculty meeting, threatened to withhold bonuses from any faculty member who would vote against Peery or attempt to thwart her appointment.”
Yikes.
“Dean Rodriguez knew that this discriminatory hiring edict was illegal and would expose the university to lawsuits. So he ordered the Northwestern faculty to never discuss candidates for hiring over the faculty listserv, and explicitly mentioned litigation risk as his reason for banning listserv discussions of faculty candidates.”
The DEI fad, which arose out of the crack-brainedt conclusion that the accidental death of a black, over-dosing lifetime petty perp under the knee of a careless white Minnesota cop would be best addressed by installing a nation-wide policy of using anti-white, anti-male discrimination in filling jobs from Vice-President and Supreme Court Justice to faculty and corporate managers. It is a main feature of The Great Stupid that began spreading its bat-like wings over the land in 2020, and has done too much damage already. It has to go.
Even the Trump Deranged should have the sense and integrity to cheer on President Trump for dismantling this institutionalized bigotry. The Northwestern fiasco is an excellent example of why.
Ethics Alarms 
On a related note, here is a comment on Reason.com by Brett Bellmore.
https://reason.com/volokh/2025/01/22/trumps-executive-order-banning-affirmative-action-and-dei-preferences/?comments=true#comment-10881183
A basic problem here is that you can, demonstrably, persuade people that racial discrimination is a moral wrong. The general public has arrived at that position, even if some of our governing elites haven’t yet.
And you can persuade people that racial discrimination is morally right, at least if it’s against OTHER people, as Jim Crow demonstrated.
What has yet to be demonstrated is that you can persuade the majority that racial discrimination against themselves is morally right.
Advocates of racial preferences, for whatever excuse, risk a partial victory: Persuading the majority that racial discrimination isn’t wrong, while failing to persuade them that it ought to be against themselves.
That’s not a place we want to return to, is it?
I like that the EEOC specifically mentions instructions to avoid written discussions and having verbal directives is considered a red flag for discriminatory practices.
I worked for HP under the tenure of Carly Fiorina. She was clearly a DEI hire aa the company transitioned from founder control to investment fund control. She quickly implemented what we now call DEI policies. But none were in writing. Managers were told verbally that they would have performance issues if they didn’t play along. This affected hiring, but at the time the bigger impact was who got laid off. Non Asian minorities and women were protected, no matter performance. Shortly after Carly was canned, there was a bloodbath as all the protections ended and years of estopped terminations were unleashed.
Carly later running as a Republican killed me, knowing what I went through. Fortunately she did as well in the primary as Kamala Harris did.
As an aside, one of the interesting facets of going through this was the Asian angle. Only about half of whites get pissed at affirmative action, the left leaning folks feeling guilty. Not so among my Asian coworkers. They were universally pissed at all if it.
I find it hilarious that television commercials are all staffed with tons of black people, and the second most dominant group are Asian. The rule is evidently that if you have to have someone in a commercial other than a black person, use an Asian person (or a Hispanic looking one if you can’t find an Asian). And yet, Asians are even more despised than white people when it comes to hiring in tech and admissions to elite schools because they’re so good at math and science! And yet, in the DEI world of television commercials, Asians are just fine at keeping white people out of the picture. I suspect black people are annoyed by being pandered to by television advertisers, but Asians must be absolutely apoplectic.
I’m sorry, but, if we want to be just, President Trump needs to suspend all federal funding AND participation in federal student loans to all institutions that participated in DEI hiring until all such individuals have been fired from the university. These individuals participated in illegal race-based discrimination and they cannot be allowed to be paid by the federal government any longer.
You know the left would demand the same for anyone or any institution that owned slaves prior to 1865 or people who supported segregation in the 1950’s or 1960’s. The only difference is that those were legal at the time. Today, if there was a university that allowed KKK members or Aryan nation members to be faculty and high-level administrators, they would be banned in such a way, despite the fact that it is not illegal to be a member of those. They would ban them because people who believe in racial discrimination shouldn’t be getting federal funds even if they never actively discriminate against anyone. Well, these schools have had a long history of actively, proudly, and publicly discriminating based on race in violation of federal laws.
Hillsdale College was banned from federal funding and their students were banned from receiving federal student loans for requiring students to take a class covering Christian theology for graduation. The students didn’t have to be a Christian, they just needed to take a class on the Bible. They are a Christian school. Shouldn’t schools that blatantly violated federal law to discriminate based on race be treated at least as harshly? Shouldn’t the lawbreakers need to be fired before being reinstated?
I know that the federal government, including the courts, allowed the law to be violated without punishment, but since when did “I was just following orders” or “They let me get away with it” protect people from illegal actions?
Why are you sorry? I see nothing in that response worthy of a pre-emptive apology. Part of “draining the swamp” is cleaning up the incubation sites. Well written!
Agreed
They probably don’t need to take everyone’s funding. Rather they need to choose high profile school — like, a notable blog owner’s alma mater — and hammer them. Sue the heck out of that school, withhold federal funding, encourage the state to do the same (not that they would), etc.
Make an example on that one school — to encourage the others.
The rest will get them message. If not — well, then you bring out the big guns.
Check out the history of SMU football.
I have never gone through the process of trying to borrow money to finance an education, so Fisk away.
Ever since Biden decided that adults that took out loans didn’t need to pay them back, I thought schools with billions of dollars in endowments should’ve been excited to demonstrate how wonderful it would be to relieve its graduates of debt.
After all, these institutions had the highest tuitions which, in turn, made its students’ debt burdens far higher than a student who had gone to college & gotten a degree from a lesser-known in-state school.
It seemed only rational that these high-tuition schools that championed the student-debt bailout scheme would be chomping at the bit, just like their enlightened stances about other social-, environmental-, & racial-justice issues.
I don’t know what a school is allowed to do with endowments, but I suspect hypocrisy is the overriding factor in the decision to not pony up.
Beautimous, BS!
PWS