University of Illinois Sued Over Racial Hiring Quotas

The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) was slapped with a lawsuit on Monday over a slew of race-based hiring programs that discriminate against white scholars, the latest sign that faculty hiring could become a target for litigants seeking to challenge racial preferences under the Trump administration.

The plaintiff, Stephen Kleinschmit, a former professor of public administration and data science, alleges that he was fired for raising concerns about the programs. The initiatives include “racial equity” plans that call on departments to “hire three [people of color]” and a separate program run by UIC’s diversity office that funds the recruitment of “underrepresented” scholars.

To apply for those funds, departments must describe their DEI goals and what’s been done to achieve them. The result is a long paper trail of applications—first reported by the Washington Free Beacon—in which departments openly pledge to discriminate based on race, outlining quotas for “minoritized” scholars and indicating that white people should be barred from teaching certain subjects.

“[T]he curricular offerings on conventionally marginalized fields such as the arts of African, African-American, African diaspora and Black-Indigenous communities by overwhelmingly white scholars have become ethically problematic,” UIC’s art history department wrote in a 2020 application for the program. Hiring a “Person of Color […]  will be a major step towards reconciling these conflicts.”

Such statements form the backbone of Kleinschmit’s complaint, which argues his firing was both a form of retaliation and race discrimination. Though UIC claimed he was being fired due to budget cuts—which did not result in any other layoffs—those cuts came as his department was seeking to hire a scholar “from a community of color,” according to the applications reported by the Free Beacon. 

“Professor Kleinschmit was targeted … because he spoke up about racially discriminatory hiring programs,” the complaint alleges. {snip}

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At UIC, all departments are required to submit “advancing racial equity” plans to the school’s DEI office, which in 2020 released a set of templates for what those plans should look like. The templates instruct departments to set hard racial quotas—”hire at least 3 new tenure-track faculty of color,” for example—and to submit progress reports on the steps being taken to meet them.

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The university has also incentivized race-based hiring through its Bridge to Faculty program, which provides money to departments to hire “underrepresented” scholars. {snip}

In nearly 40 applications for the program reviewed by the Free Beacon, departments disparaged “White Masculinity,” called for “additional BIPOC/female/nonbinary faculty,” and claimed it would be “immoral” to recruit “underrepresented graduate students” without first hiring professors who “look like them.”

Several also stated that they would target faculty with a focus on activist scholarship. The math department said it wanted a scholar of “race and power in undergraduate mathematics education,” for example. And the biomedical engineering department, which received funding through the program, said that its ideal candidate would “train the next generation of Biomedical Engineers in DEI principles.”

These initiatives had an extraordinary effect on the racial makeup of UIC’s faculty. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of black and Hispanic tenure track professors rose by over 25 percent, according to data from the school’s Office of Institutional Research, while the number of white tenure-track professors declined by 4 percent.

Soon enough, Kleinschmit began hearing from his colleagues that some of the new hires were not up to snuff. It was “demoralizing,” he told the Free Beacon, to see unqualified scholars fast-tracked for tenure because of their race.

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