Kemit Mawakana says he first got wind that his future as a law professor was threatened two years ago, during a meeting with Shelley Broderick, his boss and the dean of University of the District of Columbia Law School, a historically black college. Broderick advised him to quit because the tenure application he had filed would be rejected, Makawana says. To be turned down for tenure, she told him, would “ruin your career.” Months later, UDC turned down Mawakana for tenure and fired him.
Now Mawakana, who is black, is suing UDC for discrimination based on what says is a “policy of subjecting African-American professors seeking tenure and/or promotion to higher and more onerous standards than UDC applies to similarly situated white applicants,” according to the suit, filed in October.
His case gained momentum on Friday, when the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that a former professor at UDC, Stephanie Brown, who is also black, could proceed in her separate lawsuit against the school for denying her tenure based on her race and gender. Brown, who worked at the school for 20 years, was denied tenure around the same time that a white male colleague with no written scholarship, according to Mawakana's suit, was awarded tenure.
The suit is the latest of a string of allegations against universities for racism or sexism in tenure decisions, which are often based on a mix of objective and subjective criteria. In 2012, DePaul University settled a suit filed by three women professors alleging that they were denied tenure because of their gender. The same year, a fourth professor sued DePaul for rejecting her tenure application due to race and gender discrimination. In June, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a government agency, settled charges against Chapman University for withholding tenure from a business school professor because of her race.
The accusations of racism levied against UDC are unique because the university is a historically black institution.
“It’s a broader pattern. Its not a one-off thing,” says UDC's Brown. “It’s racism, pure and simple.” Both professors say they were especially distraught to find racism lurking in the halls of an institution dedicated to promoting black achievement.
“It’s extremely disappointing, particularly at an HBCU,” says Mawakana of his experience. “If law schools themselves are engaging in racial misconduct, that is a problem and it calls into question the legitimacy of a school and its mission.” Mawakana says the law school is running afoul of UDC’s stated mission to “build a diverse generation of competitive, civically engaged scholars and leaders.”
Mawakana says that his credentials, including two academic papers nominated for national awards, were more impressive than those of the white professors granted tenure by the school in recent years. Of the five professors considered for tenure since 2011, three black candidates were rejected and two white professors were accepted.
The tenured faculty of the school, made up of four black professors and nine white professors, were the first to vote “no” on Mawakana’s application, arguing his research was not up to snuff. In the next rounds of voting, the dean and provost, who are both white, voted to decline tenure to Mawakana , also on the basis of his scholarly papers.
“We are deeply committed to having a diverse faculty, and the proof is in the pudding,” says UDC’s dean, Broderick, who notes that six of the nine faculty members hired since 2009 are people of color, including four black hires. Broderick declined to comment on the specifics of the ongoing lawsuit.
For his part, Mawakana says that making a broken system more diverse won’t make it fair. “It doesn’t matter if the professors are majority white, majority blue, or majority purple: they are achieving a racially discriminatory result.”
