DEI Brings Kafka to My Law School
wsj.com
wsj.com
The gist appears to be that a colleague put a hand on his shoulder to get his attention and Mr. Gerber interpreted this as an assault. The court disagreed with his interpretation, as did the US 6th Circuit upon appeal.
The nature of the firing makes a lot more sense if this is an individual with a history of reacting to common workplace interactions with legal action.
I have a feeling his overall claim of being fired solely because of his opinions about diversity is about as valid as his claims of being assaulted.
[1] https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-6th-circuit/1871365.htm...
This is all just speculation of course.
His past behavior is likely causing the administration to be very, very cautious about what is said by who and where because anything touching this individual will likely result in legal action.
The university is also refusing to tell them the nature of their "investigation."
(The non-profit organization FIRE and the legal firms involved here are extremely reputable. If the university is afraid of being sued, their apparent aversion to anything resembling due process would seem to be having the opposite effect.)
Since he hasn’t contested that the refusal to participate itself was a termination-eligible offense per the staff handbook, and since he hasn’t offered any indication of anything in the staff handbook or other material that would form part of the employment contract that entitled him to know about the subject of the investigation, I don’t see how that’s material. He has not disputed that he committed an offense that is in black and white an offense justifying termination, and seems mostly to be (even if you accept his explanation in its entirety as to the facts known to him) speculating only on the context of that offense, and then suggesting that that speculative context is the real motive for firing him, not the uncontested firing-worthy offense.
Yeah, yeah, it sucks for everyone (well, everyone in private employment, without a better contract that Gerber apparently had) in this country that private employment doesn’t come with the same type of due process rights that having adverse consequences imposed by the State has. But Gerber’s a law prof, so presumably he knew that already, and, anyway, he’s not making a complaint about the legal structure of private employment relations, so, I’m really not sure what the point is beyond an argument that he is entitled to special treatment outside of the contract even though there is no general entitlement to such treatment.
FWIW this sounds normal to me. Many lawyers consider standard operating procedure with litigious individuals to be: "Give them as few specifics as possible".
Besides his claim, what basis do you have for describing this as a “fact”?
> Seems like they would not need to hide it if the reason was “you’re being removed due to excessive litigation against the school and your peers”. They would have a reason to hide “you’re being removed because you disagree with us”.
Seems like if he was going to misrepresent the reason he was being fired, misrepresenting the information he was or was not given by the people firing him would very likely be part of that. (Of course, even his account has him being given notice previously of potential cause of adverse career consequences of specific actions.) He contends that he choose to refuse to participate in the investigation he was asked to because he did not have adequate information about its content, but he does not seem to dispute that such refusal is defined as insubordination in the staff handbook nor does he allege that there is anything in University policy that entitles him to more information than he had received prior to participating in an investigation. Private employment in the US generally doesn’t come with due process rights beyond those in the employment contract. You’d think a conservative law prof, even if they weren’t working in a private institution, would know that.
None other than the same info is repeated by a third party as another commenter noted: https://www.thefire.org/news/professor-suspended-reasons-unk...
Your other points may be valid, I was just speculating. There may be additional protections here other than the handbook since he seems to have tenure, which brings additional special protections (obligatory "I'm not a lawyer")
A law professor who took his boss to court, filing a 200 page complaint after waiting until the last possible day for filing, which included a seven year history of gripes leading up to the physical altercation that went to trial… a law professor who lifts and plays golf who also got a dodgy post-hoc diagnosis a year after the event that it was the altercation tore his shoulder and not his lifestyle choices… a law professor who went through four attorneys before finally deciding to represent himself in court…
You’d perhaps think I was creating hyperbole from the linked judgment but the judgement from the appeal court — especially the tone in which it is written — is no less damning than the facts I just picked out from the first few sections.
It’s appalling that the WSJ published this professor’s blog entry as editorial commentary.
In high school my brother was frequently suspended yet he never did anything wrong, according to him. I attended the same school and also never did anything wrong, yet was never suspended. Odd that.
The thing that stands out the most in that lawsuit:
"Plaintiff's amended complaint and its attachments “exceed[ed] 200 pages and collect[ed] more than seven years' worth of workplace grievances. Gerber claims he has been bullied, lied to, retaliated against, and wrongly denied more than one hundred thousand dollars in retirement benefits” in violation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act."
If I were to write down everything I remember from my 20 years of professional life – positive, negative, anything! – then I'd struggle to reach 200 pages.
While I cannot speak to this case (and I'm somewhat skeptical being that its published in the form on a WSJ op-ed), I do think that in general terms the DEI Raj on campuses is just another way to increase the power of the administration over the faculty and raise the cost of a college education yet further.
As someone who is generally left, I'm used to the scolds being on the right, now they seem to be in my tent too, and I'm a bit flummoxed on how to make them either moderate or leave - overt actions to do so are often met with a virtual firing squad of people who I otherwise agree with 75-80%.
In the end, I think the new racialism (racial discrimination is at the root of all problems) distracts from the larger problem of poverty, which is so intertwined with racism that you cant begin to tackle the unsolved problems racism without making substantial progress on solving poverty first.
I'm starting to think there's more harm than good with DEI programs. It creates two categories of students (and grads) when looking at hiring: people you know are there on merit and people who maybe got a little bit of help from "the quota".
I've heard it (in engineering only meetings) "you know this guy is solid, he went to X and he's Asian so you know he's there for the right reasons". And the thing is, you can't really argue with that logic.
Something I have to wonder is are women and minorities... ok with this? US tax payers have voted against these practices often in the past. But elsewhere like in Canada it's now law that research grants have a racial and gender quota. Government will deny you funding if there are too many white male investigators, no matter how good the research is.
If you asked me a couple years ago, I would have told you that I was opposed to the idea of tenure. I thought it created a two-tier system: a relative handful of older professors who have made it and can basically coast, versus the untenured professors who do most of the grunt work.
But now I'm seeing that tenure can actually provide valuable protection for professors. Teaching in non-STEM subjects is ideological; it has to come from some viewpoint. And without tenure, it can reduce down to "teach your subject from the viewpoint the administrators want, or you're fired."
I realize that ONU is trying to fire Prof. Gerber, but at least he has some protections that are allowing him to fight back. From the article: "insufficient “collegiality” isn’t listed as adequate cause in ONU’s faculty handbook for dismissing a tenured faculty member...."
Though with tenure, it seems to reduce down to "teach your subject from the viewpoint the administrators want," but with the lag of about a generation. It just means conformity is enforced in hiring and by more difficult firing process.
It might actually be an improvement in some ways to get rid of tenure because it would make things worse is a way that would make them clear.
If you're in a Communist country being taught Communism by a Communist professor, if you have any understanding of the system at all, it's hard to deceive yourself into believing that Communist viewpoint is anything but propaganda from the powers-that-be. Tenure and other aspects of "academic freedom" can be undermined, but provide enough cover to allow students to deceive themselves into thinking they're being taught a truth that isn't politically-defined.
Similarly it can be used to entrench any position into the faculty. The university decides who gets tenure and only offer tenure to the people with the 'right sort of thinking' and now those are the only people around and willing to speak.
It's the brazen power-seeking by (and demanded submission to) the DEI crowd that scares me. They are willing to use the power to reshape culture and thought.
It's going to get worse before it gets better. We need a "have you no decency sir" moment.
If they're going to try to strong arm a professor for his personal opinions, why would they think it would work against a LAW professor?
They are getting more numerous by the day, outnumbering researchers by a wide margin. "Quantity has a quality of its own" said Joseph Stalin, alluding to the huge numbers of men he could put into the field. They have seen how just a few or even a single student protesting some perceived transgression can get the institute to cave to their will so what is to keep them from getting a law professor to heel?
I am concerned about DEI being used as a sort of backdoor for bad ideas being accepted and enforced in the workplace or university. There's a real chance, in my mind, for DEI to justify actions that we normally consider unethical: suppressing or compelling speech, unjustly firing people, excluding people who don't think like us from positions of power.
But I'm not sure how often this happens. I do see plenty of headlines that make bold, negative claims about DEI, but they seem to fall apart under scrutiny.
So I'm curious: what specifically are we concerned about with this article? And is anyone aware of a list tracking egregious but solid examples of DEI-run-amok?
I followed Bari early on after she left the Times, and I was always intrigued by the examples she brought up of unjust actions taken in the workpace or university in the name of 'wokeness'.
That said, I noticed that some of these examples didn't hold up to scrutiny, at least in my eyes. What I mean is that actions taken in those cases seemed justified to me, even without relying on DEI or 'wokeness'.
A couple of years have passed now, though, so it does seem like I should take a second look.
Just like I dont consider the source for this (the WSJ Opinions are only slightly less unhinged than NRO) to be ideologically neutral.
BTW, to get crisp: she and similar others (I’m in this camp) support fair and equal treatment of minorities. What we oppose is the following (a common def of the form of wokeness they oppose). (1) assertion that any observed inequality is due to racism sexism etc (2) that we should fix this via racial or other quota systems.
We think (1) is obviously wrong and that (2) is highly unethical — Ie this particular ideology is rubbish and very harmful for our society.
Others disagree and they influence many of our institutions today. Maybe you think these axioms are cool, I don’t know. At any rate, There are people who do and in fact they are prevalent. Bari Weiss’s work (among other things now) catalogs examples of people who follow these principles and in this context argues why she and others find their principles wrong.
But just like this article, its one side of a complex story - so when I show up and suggest people apply a filter for ideological bias - its just that, a warning that this content should be consumed with and awareness of the ideological priors of the people writing it.
I actually want people to reconsider their own priors - but I think that to do that, you need to have a good awareness of what those priors are - not just for you, but for the media you consume.
FWIW, I'm an ardent believer in Poverty being at the root of most issues, including most cases of perceived institutional racism, because Poverty and Race have become so intrinsically linked that Race is now a proxy for Poverty.
One is the lack of transparency. Honestly, the guy sounds like an arsehole, but even arseholes should be treated fairly. “Quit or we’ll fire you” when you won’t even explain why is definitely outside the realm of fairness.
Second is the theatre. There’s a whole range of ways they could get him to meet the dean. You could email him asking to schedule a meeting, or at the other end of the spectrum, you could politely ask him to come with you at the end of the lecture. Unless they expected some harm to come from letting him complete his lecture, sending campus police into a classroom and interrupting a lecture to escort him away serves no purpose other than humiliating him.
The goal of every program is survival and DEI programs survive by subjugating others.
It’s so jarring to hear this, viewpoint diversity was the primary selling point for diversity in general in the corporate world until very recently. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the case that hiring non-white people made the company stronger because people with different backgrounds being different perspectives and that makes products better etc.
Now it seems that that pretense has been dropped and it’s just about skin color now.
Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov was right, his predictions [3] have mostly come to pass:
“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore,” said Bezmenov. “A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures; even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him [a] concentration camp, he will refuse to believe it, until he [receives] a kick in his fan-bottom. When a military boot crashes his balls then he will understand. But not before that. That’s the [tragedy] of the situation of demoralization.”
It’s hard not to see in that the state of many modern Americans. We have become a society of polarized tribes, with some people flat out rejecting facts in favor of narratives and opinions.
Indeed, and that was in 1984.
Once demoralization is completed, the second stage of ideological brainwashing is “destabilization”. During this two-to-five-year period, asserted Bezmenov, what matters is the targeting of essential structural elements of a nation: economy, foreign relations, and defense systems. Basically, the subverter (Russia) would look to destabilize every one of those areas in the United States, considerably weakening it.
Bezemov thought of Russia being the subverter but it seems that the USA and to a certain extent the west has proven itself to be capable of subverting itself without the need for more foreign assistance.
The third stage would be “crisis.” It would take only up to six weeks to send a country into crisis, explained Bezmenov. The crisis would bring “a violent change of power, structure, and economy” and will be followed by the last stage, “normalization.” That’s when your country is basically taken over, living under a new ideology and reality.
This will happen to America unless it gets rid of people who will bring it to a crisis, warned Bezmenov. What’s more “if people will fail to grasp the impending danger of that development, nothing ever can help [the] United States,” adding, “You may kiss goodbye to your freedom.”
[1] https://communistcrimes.org/en/elite-and-their-privileges-so...