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.
This could be a racketeering enterprise.
