Woke Witch Hunts Are Losing in Court

So strong is the gravitational pull of “wokeness” that it has caused many college and university leaders to approve of appalling treatment of faculty members who dared to question the prevailing leftist orthodoxies. Fortunately, our legal system still protects the rights of professors against such mistreatment, and three high-profile cases recently ended in victory for the plaintiffs.

Let’s start with the case brought by Professor Bruce Gilley of Portland State University.

Since public universities are legally bound to respect the First Amendment, Gilley filed suit. In June 2022, the (since-retired) communication manager of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion, who goes by the name tova stabin—no capital letters—posted a tweet reading, “You can interrupt racism.” To that, Gilley replied, “All men are created equal.” That thought so triggered stabin that she blocked Gilley on the site, making it impossible for him to view, reply to, or retweet anything posted on the Division’s account. Since public universities are legally bound to respect the First Amendment, Gilley filed suit for that infringement on his right of free speech. (Gilley has written for the Martin Center on several occasions.)

The foolish behavior by the University of Oregon has cost the taxpayers plenty. In discovery, he found an exchange between a university official and the defendant in which she explained her conduct: “He was not just being obnoxious, but bringing obnoxious people to the site.” That speaks volumes about the mindset of so many college administrators these days. For someone to oppose their beliefs with even a statement as central to our nation as “All men are created equal” is intolerable. Such people deserve to be silenced.

You might think that the University of Oregon would have immediately realized that it was responsible for a clear violation of Gilley’s rights and settled the case. But you’d be mistaken; it fought until a recent court decision made it clear that Gilley would prevail. Law professor Jonathan Turley has the details in this article, in which he notes that the foolish behavior by the university has cost the taxpayers plenty—$193,000 in legal fees paid to Gilley’s attorneys and over half a million in its own legal costs incurred while trying to defend the indefensible.

Turley comments, “These losses rarely result in administrators being held accountable for not just the original transgression but the decision to litigate dubious claims.” He’s right—it’s a shame that colleges and universities allow their ideologically zealous employees to create costs for taxpayers to bear. I’d suggest that the state think hard about whether its university system needs a “Division of Equity and Inclusion” at all.

Next, we have the case of Professor Timothy Jackson of the University of North Texas. He is a professor of music, and you might wonder what a music professor could do to bring about a costly legal battle. All Jackson did was disagree with some ideas expressed by a leftist professor.

In 2019, Hunter College music professor Philip Ewell gave a talk at a conference hosted by the Society for Music Theory entitled “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” which the Society promptly published. In it, he argued that an Austrian music theorist, Heinrich Schenker, whose ideas on musical analysis are still followed by some, was a virulent racist. According to Ewell, Schenker’s method “exists to benefit members of the dominant white race of music theorists.”

Ewell understood that the easiest way for an academic to get attention these days is to play the race card. Doing that gets vastly more attention than even the most brilliantly researched paper.

One person who read Ewell’s paper was not impressed—Prof. Timothy Jackson. He is one of those who find merit in Schenker’s mode of analysis. In fact, he founded a journal devoted to it, the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. Jackson was aghast at the claim that Schenker was a racist and that classical music suffers from a “white frame,” so he organized an issue of his journal devoted to Ewell’s paper. It included 15 essays, the majority of them critical, including his own. This is how the academic world is supposed to function, with arguments followed by counterarguments.

But with the onset of wokeness in academe, arguments saying “wrong” things are often met with demands for censorship and punishment. Disagree with anything by a “progressive” and you are likely to find yourself in serious trouble. Prof. Jackson did.

With the onset of wokeness in academe, arguments saying “wrong” things are often met with demands for censorship. Right after his journal issue came out, it was attacked by the Society for Music Theory, with more than 900 members signing a letter calling Jackson’s symposium a violation of the Society’s policies against harassment and unethical behavior. They demanded that Jackson be expelled from membership. That letter quickly found its way into the hands of graduate students in the UNT music department, who issued their own letter demanding that the university fire Jackson because his “racism” had made the university “toxic.” And 17 of the 23 faculty members in the department signed, as well.

UNT’s was your typical kangaroo court, which didn’t follow regular university procedures or anything resembling due process. How would the UNT administration respond to the leftist demands for vengeance?

It knew that firing Jackson would be difficult because he held tenure, but it sought to placate the raging mob of students and faculty by convening an ad hoc panel to “investigate” his behavior. This was your typical kangaroo court, which didn’t follow regular university procedures or anything resembling due process. It found Jackson guilty of “unethical practices” with regard to his editing of his journal (to disagree with a woke idea is “unethical”), and the journal was taken away from him.

Jackson sued UNT. Rather than seeing that it had trampled upon his rights and settling, UNT decided to fight. But after a federal court ruled against its motion to dismiss the case in 2023, it evidently dawned on the UNT brass that a jury in Denton, Texas, might be very unsympathetic to the way they had treated Prof. Jackson. So, in July, UNT agreed to a settlement under which it pays Jackson $400,000 (and $325,000 to his legal team) and restores him to the editorship of the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. In return, Jackson agreed to drop his claims against the defendants for defamation and violation of his rights to free speech.

This is a substantial measure of justice for Jackson, but, as is usually the case, the university officials who were responsible for caving in to the mob and doing so much to ruin his life won’t feel any pain. In fact, Jennifer Cowley, who as UNT provost was central to the efforts to punish Jackson, was later elevated to the presidency of the University of Texas-Arlington.

Third, there is the case of Professor Scott Gerber, who was abruptly terminated by the Ohio Northern University School of Law (ONU) in 2023, despite the fact that he was tenured and had an exemplary academic record. Shockingly, one day during a class, Prof. Gerber was ordered out of the class by armed security guards and ushered into a meeting with the dean, who told him that he had to resign immediately.

What had Gerber done to deserve such treatment?

The university would not give him a straight answer, but he was sure it was because he had dared to disagree with the school’s DEI policies. The zealous dean and university president apparently thought they needed to make an example of him to discourage others from speaking out against their “diversity” mania. The fig leaf they concocted to justify his firing was his alleged “lack of collegiality.” For a brilliant evisceration of ONU’s position, read this article by Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars.

ONU decided to fight Gerber’s resultant suit and dragged things out for two years, with mounting legal expenses for the school, which is not a public entity. But when the judge ruled against the school’s motion to dismiss the case, that must have sent shivers down the spines of the defense, as the huge jury verdict against Oberlin College (also in Ohio) is a vivid reminder that most ordinary American citizens look with disfavor upon “woke” administrators who let their ideological fanaticism drive them to harm innocent people.

ONU decided to fight Gerber’s suit and dragged things out for two years, with mounting legal expenses for the school. In the settlement of the case, Gerber is reinstated, and ONU acknowledges that he was never a “safety risk” who needed to be treated like a criminal, that he never acted with moral turpitude, and that he has always provided the school with outstanding teaching, service, and scholarship. (Here is the press release from America First Legal on the case.) The financial details, however, have been kept private.

While the settlement is a vindication for Prof. Gerber, it does not appear to inflict any costs on the officials who thought it was appropriate to keelhaul a respected faculty member because he criticized the law school’s “progressive” agenda. ONU’s governing board should be prodded to terminate them, since they’re the ones who acted with moral turpitude.

These cases are welcome victories, but I suspect that college officials like those responsible for them will keep on putting their politics over the rights of faculty members.

George Leef is director of external relations at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.