DePaul law prof who defended colleague in N-word controversy sues school for alleged bias
DePaul University College of Law/Wikipedia.
An African-American professor at DePaul University's College of Law is back in the news after coming to the defense of a white colleague over his controversial use of the N-word in class.
Terry Smith had backed Donald Hermann, the subject of student complaints for using the racial slur in a criminal law hypothetical about a white supremacist.
Smith told the Chicago Sun-Times that Hermann’s use of the N-word “was not gratuitous,” and that Hermann was perhaps the most progressive of his white colleagues.
Smith’s regard for Hermann does not extend to the law school and its dean. In a civil rights lawsuit filed last Wednesday in Chicago federal court, Smith claims the school retaliated against him because of his advocacy for racial diversity at the school. Among the defendants is law dean Jennifer Rosato Perea, Law360 reports in an article noted by Above the Law.
“For the better part of a decade,” the suit said, “Professor Smith has complained about an environment at the law school that is hostile to him. This has caused faculty to retaliate by freezing him out of the law school’s power structure.”
Smith’s suit says Rosato Perea has recommended he be fired following an investigation into complaints by two law professors whose tenure applications he had opposed. The two law professors had contended Smith opposed their tenure because they do not subscribe to his views of institutional racism. In reality, Smith said, his opposition was motivated by serious doubts about their qualifications, and there was no racial litmus test.
An investigation followed the professors’ complaints and Smith was accused of engaging in “a pattern of bullying that rises to the level of extreme intimidation and aggression,” leading to Rosato Perea’s firing recommendation. Yet Smith’s personnel file had contained no documentation of the alleged bullying or aggression, according to the suit.
The only other tenured black male professor at the law school is the law librarian, according to Smith’s suit.
Despite his advocacy on racial issues, Smith didn’t back the complaints of black students who complained about Hermann’s hypothetical, described to the Sun-Times this way: A white supremacist at a funeral of a civil rights leader uses the N-word, causing the crowd to come after him. If the white supremacist shoots and kills someone, can he claim self-defense?
The answer, Hermann says, is that the white supremacist is guilty of murder because he was the aggressor. “My argument was that almost every other slur would not be enough in a similar context to make the harasser an aggressor,” he said.
Using an alternate word to describe the slur “waters down the discussion and the significance of the word,” he told the Sun-Times.
Smith came to his colleague’s defense, telling the Sun-Times that, “increasingly, we are dumbing down legal education for students. And increasingly they are ill-prepared to go out and represent clients. They will encounter this terminology and worse in practice. What will they do then?”
Smith also said he thinks the students’ negative reaction to the N-word is prompted by “a sense of entitlement that they should not be offended or provoked in the classroom.”
DePaul’s Office of Institutional Diversity & Equity is investigating Hermann’s N-word hypothetical. And DePaul responded to Smith’s lawsuit in a statement that said “erroneous details” were circulating about the matter.
The statement said Rosato Perea began the disciplinary process “in response to numerous and long-standing complaints” from Smith’s colleagues. The investigation looked into complaints that Smith and another faculty member “inflicted several acts of professional and personal bullying on their colleagues, including junior faculty and faculty of color.”
“The investigation was conducted fairly and objectively, according to the university’s established disciplinary process. It was motivated only by the desire to get to the bottom of the complaints about bullying, discord and toxic behavior, and to address those complaints in a way that protects the community and enables the law school to move forward together,” the statement said.
“The faculty facing discipline are being given due process, which includes opportunities to respond to the allegations.”
