Affirmative Action Suit Details How Law School Blackballed Accomplished White Men

Northwestern Law School made faculty job offers to only three white men in the last three years, passing over intellectual giants in favor of less qualified black females, including one who graduated “near the bottom of her class” and another who plagiarized when writing an exam, according to a blistering lawsuit filed on Tuesday.

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The lawsuit delves into the details of Northwestern’s recent hiring to paint a picture of affirmative action that is not simply a tie-breaker between equals, but rather the near-total exclusion of highly qualified white males in favor of minorities with weak qualifications, and whose hiring typically ends in disaster.

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The lawsuit says it was impossible for even the brightest legal minds to reach a classroom if they were white. Northwestern declined to even interview Eugene Volokh, a “prolific and internationally renowned legal scholar,” for a job, the suit said — adding that Vice Dean Emily Kadens “openly said that Professor Volokh would have been hired at Northwestern had he been anything other than a white man.”

Meanwhile, it hired Destiny Peery, a black woman who graduated from Northwestern Law “near the bottom of her class,” something Northwestern’s faculty was well aware of, and which ordinarily would be an absolute roadblock to being hired as a law professor.

By the time Peery came up for her three-year employment review, where the school decides to get rid of or promote junior faculty, Peery had published almost nothing, but fellow black professor Janice Nadler, who was in charge of the review, misled the committee by falsely claiming old dissertation chapters were actually new work.

After that was exposed, Nadler shifted gears to complain that because of her race, the school had given Peery so many speaking opportunities that she had no time to write. The committee voted to retain Peery, despite being “incensed” by Nadler’s dishonesty, the suit said.

At the five-year mark, when a final decision on tenure is made, Peery had still “failed to produce any scholarship that could warrant a tenured appointment,” and was warned not to seek tenure. Peery then accused “Northwestern of racism for denying her tenure, pretending that she was a victim of race and sex discrimination when racial preferences were the very reason she was hired in the first place,” the suit said.

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Similarly, Northwestern hired “another unqualified black woman named Candice Player, who (like Peery) failed to obtain tenure after proving herself incapable of producing scholarship that could justify a tenured appointment. Player also struggled in the classroom, and admitted to colleagues that she did not understand the material she was teaching and couldn’t handle the students’ questions. In one of her classes, Player gave a final exam in which she had plagiarized an exam hypothetical from another source, because Player was too lazy to write her own exam question,” the suit continued.

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In 2022, the school hired Jamelia Morgan, a black woman from the low-ranked UC Irving with only four years of teaching, and gave her a $900,000 budget to start a “Center for Racial and Disability Justice.” {snip}

In all, in 2023-24 Northwestern Law made six offers of employment, none of which went to white men. The prior year, it made nine offers, only one of which went to a white man (whose scholarship focused on promoting affirmative action).

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