Ex-Prof: I Left UVa for Georgetown Due to Anti-Gay Bias, 'Tantrum' & Insults
An almost 25-year-old law school tenure decision is suddenly controversial, following testimony by a now-high-profile professor before a Congressional committee last month that he was denied fair consideration due to his sexual orientation. In response, the law school’s dean says it does not discriminate and strives to maintain a welcoming environment to all members of the academic community.
William Eskridge Jr., who is gay, cited his own experience in 1985 at the University of Virginia School of Law as an example of why the proposed Employment and Non-Discrimination Act of 2009 is needed to ban both states and private employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the UVA Law Blog and Above the Law.
Eskridge says he himself first found about an adverse appointments committee report that unfairly discounted his scholarship when the chairman “stormed into my office and screamed at me for 10 minutes or so,” apparently under the mistaken belief that Eskridge already knew about the report and complained. “With clenched fists and a beet-red face, the chair of the committee threw a tantrum that included a string of accusations, such as ‘stabbing me in the back’ and behaving in the treacherous manner that he and his colleagues ought to have expected of a ‘faggot,’ ” says Eskridge in his testimony to the House Committee on Education and Labor.
He says the unidentified committee chairman also “spat on me and called me dirty names,” reducing Eskridge to tears.
Eskridge also contends that he should have been given an opportunity to respond to the adverse conclusions made about his qualifications, as standard practice dictated, before a tenure decision was made. As a result of the way the tenure situation was handled, he says, he left Virginia for Georgetown University Law Center in 1988. He is now a professor at Yale Law School.
Hunter of Justice provides a link to Eskridge’s testimony.
Eskridge’s accusations have created a firestorm in law school circles and sparked a response from the current dean of Virginia’s law school. His written statement is detailed in Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports:
Dean Paul Mahoney, who came to the law school after Eskridge left, says those with whom he has spoken deny that Eskridge was targeted due to his sexual orientation. Eskridge, writes Mahoney, was deferred for a subsequent tenure decision, rather than being either granted or denied tenure, because “the faculty wished to see the fruits of his promising, but nascent, scholarly interest in legislation before granting tenure.
“His subsequent scholarship in that area was highly successful and influential,” Mahoney’s statement continues, “and he would certainly have received tenure at Virginia had he not resigned to accept a lateral offer from Georgetown.”
