I wonder if she's any relation of Simon Bolivar Buckner, the guy who wouldn't swap his four-star helmet for an ordinary one and got shot through the stars by a Japanese sniper?
How I, A White Male Tenured Professor, Was The Victim Of Racial And Gender Discrimination From A Black Woman Whose Speciality Is Critical Race Theory
by
Paul Campos
(15,000 words)
1: Amazon reviews aren't always very accurate. Go by the number of sales too.
I forgot who Campos was. Is it worth remembering?
How I, A White Male Tenured Professor, Was The Victim Of Racial And Gender Discrimination From A Black Woman Whose Speciality Is Critical Race Theory
I think the primary complaint about discrimination was against the chair of the evaluation committee. His main complaint about the Dean is that she had no interest in examining what had happened. I do think that's a problem. One of my better moments of arguing with anyone on the internet was in response to a guest post at Crooked Timber by someone associated with the Heterodox Academy. I made the point that, if they're worried that there's discrimination against conservative students, rather than trying to build some structure to specifically protect conservative students they should work with the people who already have responsibility for investigating complaints about discrimination and make sure that they are prepared to help conservative students if problems arise.
I think I was correct to make the argument at that time, and I still think that it is best for the institution if people who have responsibility for handling complaints do so, even if the complaint comes from a white man.
I will say, part of why I called it a "best case scenario" is that, as he says, the primary reason people were annoyed at him was that he had been criticizing the financial model of the law school for many years, and that had ruffled feathers. I expect that in most workplaces, without tenure, he would have been forced out much earlier for that sort of criticism.
2: Ah, the Concern Troll of Sorrow has logged on.
To be honest I'm more curious about the reasoning process that leads parents to christen their daughter "Lolita".
Campos tends to get a little frenetic/fixated, such that I don't take his assertions at face value. (AIHMHB, he shared a chart supposedly of real gas prices over the decades, which was actually some autogenerated online pap that compared gas prices to gas CPI so canceled each other out to unity, and he never corrected it.)
But the simple and provable facts he's laid out seem pretty conclusive in this case.
10: Yes, overall one of my least favorite LG&M FPP. He has to mind been a bit better recently.
I would agree with 10, and I do think this was a remarkable story.
2 made me laugh and Ajay ought to feel ashamed.
He's got some legitimate beefs - arguable in the case of the original evaluation but pretty much slam dunk thathe dean screwed up in a major way. I side with Campos but some of the issues raised about his publication record seem legitimate -- the majority of his cites coming from a 2005 article about obesity in an epidemiology journal and a quite short law review article aren't the types of things to earn a top research rating. But given his other publications, bottom 2% of faculty is just stupid.
I've served on merit evaluation committees and quite often the members simply don't put in the work but instead just give a rating based on what's on a single sheet of paper,n so you get travesties like this one. And even more as a faculty union official, it was exceedingly apparent that many deans, department heads and other senior administrators had no clue what the contract says and requires and didn't give a care about it in either case because they think it shouldn't exist. And the dean in this case sounds like an idiot, quite incompetent at parts of her job which generally includes not getting sued for cause.
14 no, not about this he shouldn't
14 no, not about this he shouldn't
Are you willing to elaborate on that? It's possible that I'm being too credulous about Campos's version of events, but I don't think that snark is a good summary of the situation.
Campos is a dick and not very reliable in general, but he seems to be correct about what happened in this specific case. I'm not really convinced by his argument about law school finances, though; it's not as obvious as he implies that law schools shouldn't be subsidized by other parts of the university, especially since the most apparent alternative is jacking up tuition and relying on student loans paid off by BigLaw salaries. Also his hint at the end that he wants to be dean is crass and a little delusional. Dude, you just sued them and made them pay you a bunch of money. They can't fire you because you have tenure, but they're not going to make you dean.
I wouldn't argue with 18, but it seems worth noting that it takes a certain. . . comfort with conflict to sue one's employer in the first place. So, if you think that sort of lawsuit is legitimate, it's not that unlikely that the plaintiff will come across as a bit of an ass
Dude, you just sued them and made them pay you a bunch of money.
It seems like if you are a law prof and sue your law school and win they should totally make you a dean. In fact, it should be a requirement, to demonstrate that you are good at law, which is an important qualification for being the dean of a law school. Whoever sues the school for the most money gets to be head dean, or whatever they call it. Provost. You get to be provost until one of the underdeans beats the school in a lawsuit.
In fact, it should be a requirement, to demonstrate that you are good at law, which is an important qualification for being the dean of a law school.
This is apparently not the case!
Did you all understand that his complaint is arguing that he is being discriminated against as a Latino? From the articles, he doesn't appear to actually believe that is the case.
8 is harsh, but 2 is blowing my mind. Is it 100% just that it's Paul Campos? I would never, ever have expected ajay to side with the dean over something like this (links to a summary of Campos' logorrheic posts):
Knowing that litigation was coming, Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss made some questionable strategic moves including kicking Campos off of a committee and writing an email to Campos explaining that she was doing it in response to his complaint. No one necessarily expects the legal academy to be experts in the practicalities, but telling the plaintiff you're retaliating against them should probably warrant a lesson.
Or over something like this:
The account of the suit continues, noting that the school took a course away from Campos based upon "racially insensitive" and "gender biased" remarks made in his last class. This is, of course, an entirely reasonable reason to strip a professor of a class. But the administration has got to bring receipts if it wants to do something like this and, per Campos, the school has not only refused to point to any specific remarks, but...
My attorney pointed out to the law school that we were in possession of complete recordings of all of my Property classes from the previous spring, and that a review of them revealed how utterly without basis the claim that I had made racist or sexist remarks in class was.
This feels like it's going to be an unintended consequence of the pandemic going forward. While some professors filmed classes for years, everyone got into the practice during the COVID years and consequently it's going to get a whole lot easier to ding a professor for inappropriate behavior and, as in this case, a whole lot harder to improperly ding a professor for inappropriate behavior.
Ajay, is your assumption that Campos, our only source here, is grossly misrepresenting all of this? I feel like if this were anyone else you'd be cheering him on.
20, 21: This is a complete misunderstanding of the job. It's like thinking that the Major Leagues Commissioner needs to have a great fast ball.
Probably because I'm not reading the original links, and skimmed a summary, I'm not clear on these points: Were there separate complaints about the annual review and about retaliation following having raised questions about the annual review? If so, does the settlement suggest that he "won" (a settlement, if not a trial) on the basis of both complaints, or was the case stronger for retaliation (sounds like there was real retaliation) than for an unfair annual review?
He won a settlement, but it's in the West Bank.
If so, does the settlement suggest that he "won" (a settlement, if not a trial) on the basis of both complaints, or was the case stronger for retaliation (sounds like there was real retaliation) than for an unfair annual review?
I'm not sure, but my impression is that the settlement doesn't specify, considering:
In the settlement agreement, the university denies having done anything wrong, but, as always, actions speak louder than words. In addition to paying all of my legal fees from two years of litigation, the university paid me a substantial sum to not take the case to trial, removed Dean Inniss as my supervisor for whatever time may be left in her tenure as Dean, and made various other concessions regarding the conditions of my employment going forward.
it's about legal proceedings so i claim no derailment - anyone among the commenters-lurkers have an informed opinion whether trump can get an unsecured appellate bond?
I think once there is retaliation, whether the original complaint had merit doesn't matter.
"the most apparent alternative is jacking up tuition and relying on student loans paid off by BigLaw salaries"
Part of Campos' series has been about the exploitation of students and the federal loan system based on the false assumption that law school is a good investment for the above reason. He says that I n fact most lawyers, especially from any school below the elite tier, will have a negative return from law school and it's only propped up by false reporting about employment prospects. The fact that many low-tier law schools have gone out of business suggests he had a point.
I'm not sure what assumptions go into the "negative return" calculation, but large numbers of the people I know have gone to non-elite (but not low-tier) law schools and they seem to be doing fine.
It's more like that there are some predatory law schools, because they were a great way to get lots of loan money, and it's really hard, or was, for a student who isn't well-connected to tell the difference. Not sure how true this is post the law market shrinking, but it's definitely something our advisors take seriously.
30: Yes, that was my understanding, in part from reading stuff he's written about this a while back. So I'm surprised that he's now saying law schools also shouldn't be funded by subsidies from the university. How does he want to fund them?
I think he's saying most of them shouldn't exist at their current size, that they've become glamour projects for university administrators (his point about relative faculty increase in law vs FAS).
Yeah, it seems like the standard picture for a large chunk of law schools is to charge too many students too much money, resulting in some combination of (a) subsidies for the rest of the university and (b) a featherbedded program for professors and and others in the law school, which is mostly bad for the law students themselves, but - if Campos's forensics are accurate - U Colorado has gone the different and less traveled way of preserving (b) without (a), in fact making the rest of the university pay for it, which is also bad for the university as a whole.
To 33, I think it would be reasonable to expect law schools to pay for themselves on balance, without being big cash cows or drains. (Not the same goal for all departments, obviously.)
And the underlying question somewhat separable from whether they should be subsidized or subsidizers is how many lawyers we need to be training at large.
31: My guess is that the claim is not that a typical lawyer doesn't make a decent living, but that compared to a baseline college-educated professional, a typical lawyer doesn't make that much more relative to the cost of their degree.
My brother was in law school with a nontrivial number of future Supreme Court justices. Maybe that was at an elite-tier school?
I don't know if he makes more money than I do or not.
39: Thinking like that was why I qualified it. But I'm not a regular LGM reader, so it's not really an informed guess.
He won a settlement, but it's in the West Bank.
Moby is my hero.
There is no way I'm going to read a bunch of Paul Campos posts, but as someone who has handled a fair amount of these disputes from both sides, I guess I have a few comments. Very often, lawsuits about employment issues allege both discrimination and retaliation. More often than not, it's the retaliation counts that have staying power. Managers are human and get mad about allegations of wrongdoing, or anything that would make the manager look bad, and there are all kinds of ways to retaliate, and often it happens.
It's very common for a large institution to litigate for a while even when it's in the wrong, I think usually because the people calling the shots in the litigation don't want to lose face about the allegations in the complaint.
If it settles, the size of the settlement has some relationship to who was right or wrong, but it's loose and dependent on other variables. The way the U.S. legal system is structured in these cases, if you have some facts on your side as the plaintiff, and if they're the right kind of facts, you can get past summary judgment, which means the next step is a trial in front of a jury. The defendant employer might be 95% certain they can win at trial, but the costs of litigation go way up and there's a risk of losing big. The goal of most plaintiff-side employment attorneys is to get past summary judgment and then settle for a healthy sum that's still much less than could have been obtained at trial. And this isn't a bad idea for plaintiffs themselves, either -- they risk losing the whole case, and are often suffering quite a lot during the litigation as they are deposed, etc.
I would love to see a Major League Commissioner with a good fastball. It would be nice for the commissioner to represent players, not owners, for a change.
17 teo said it best Campos is a dick and not very reliable in general...
But i have not read the Campos screed(s) nor am i about to.
45: in this kind of a case, is it a defense to concede that the plaintiff was treated unfairly, but that it was because of a long-standing personal grudge, and had nothing to do with the plaintiff's ethnicity?
Campos says he refused to consider any offer that included a non-disclosure agreement, but apparently he did agree to an NDA regarding the terms of the settlement.
48: once again, we see the wisdom of the Analogy Ban.
I apologize to the Unfogged Community.
You know who would be a hilarious pick for baseball commissioner? Pete Rose.
Oh, apparently not. But that could soon change.
The thing about when he dies is that it means his lifetime ban from baseball will also expire, meaning they can finally let him into Cooperstown.
Cooperstown Total Landscaping will have him now.
I don't think law school faculty should be paid any more than professors of history or music theory or underwater basket weaving. I guess I also don't think much of their scholarship. Thus, imo, you could knock the expense of the things down quite a bit, and still turn a profit without putting students in too much debt to represent poor people, if they want to do that.
I did read the links, and maybe I just missed it, but from the amended complaint, it looks like Campos had a really strong case. Because of historic discrimination against Latinos by the University, it commissioned a study, which analyzed, across the University, whether Latino professors were underpaid. And, surprise, found that they, including Campos, were. In the case of Campos, the University study found he was being underpaid 13k per year, controlling for everything but race/ethnicity. OK, maybe that's a forward-leaning interpretation of the University study, but I can see why the University would rather not have a jury trial or even summary judgment motion practice.
Especially if they can settle for less than it would cost to litigate the case. (One article I saw said 160k -- I wonder how that relates to the career-long underpayment.)
The parental leave thing is probably less clear cut, but I don't doubt that thinking the guy is a bit of a jerk led them to do/say some dumb shit.
And maybe the retaliation really is as clear as he says, which might be enough to get some fee-shifting.
Campos blog posts -- and I haven't read his archive, so maybe this is unfair -- were a lot more about him, and not so much about the legacy of white supremacy, which may well be what the university was paying out for.