The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) was slapped with a lawsuit on Monday over a slew of race-based hiring programs that discriminate against white scholars, the latest sign that faculty hiring could become a target for litigants seeking to challenge racial preferences under the Trump administration.
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.
“Professor Kleinschmit was targeted … because he spoke up about racially discriminatory hiring programs,” the complaint alleges. “UIC substantially shifted resources away from the support of academic units to meet its unconstitutional race-based hiring goals, instead directing funds and a substantial portion of its hiring to racially discriminatory and noncompetitive hiring programs.”
UIC did not respond to a request for comment.
The lawsuit is the latest example of a public university facing blowback for its discriminatory employment practices. The University of Colorado Boulder paused a “critical needs” hiring program last month after documents surfaced showing that the school had targeted “BIPOC” candidates in violation of federal law. Similar documents have been unearthed at the University of Washington, Ohio State, and Vanderbilt University Medical Center. At the University of New Mexico, one professor wrote in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”
College admissions have also been the subject of discrimination complaints, most notably in the lawsuit against Harvard that outlawed affirmative action in 2023. Such cases can be difficult to win, however, because student privacy laws shield admissions files from public disclosure, forcing plaintiffs to rely on statistical evidence that is not always open and shut.
“Admissions decisions are an opaque morass at their best,” said Dan Morenoff, the executive director of the American Civil Rights Project. “Proving discrimination requires intensive econometric analysis by experts and only 2-3 law firms have ever successfully litigated that discrimination.”
The faculty hiring process, on the other hand, tends to produce a paper trail that is accessible through litigation and, at public universities, subject to public records requests. That could make programs like UIC’s easy pickings for private litigants and federal agencies amid the legal siege promised by the Trump administration, which has issued a series of executive orders targeting universities and DEI.
“Plaintiffs should have a much easier time proving universities are violating Title VII in their hiring policies than they would have proving Title VI violations in admissions,” Morenoff said, referring to the civil rights laws that cover employers and federally funded institutions. “The evidence will not be hard to find.”
At UIC, all departments are required to submit “advancing racial equity” plans to the school’s DEI office, which in 2020 released a set of templates for what those plans should look like. The templates instruct departments to set hard racial quotas—”hire at least 3 new tenure-track faculty of color,” for example—and to submit progress reports on the steps being taken to meet them.
In one such report, dated October 2023, UIC’s College of Applied Health Sciences wrote that it had hired “2 more faculty and 1 staff of color” over the previous year. “By the fall of 2024 we will have two additional faculty of color in the department (e.g., AA/PI, NA/AI, Black, and/or Latinx),” the report said.
In another report, UIC’s Global Asian Studies program pledged to hire “at least three new additional faculty … who represent diverse identities.”
The university has also incentivized race-based hiring through its Bridge to Faculty program, which provides money to departments to hire “underrepresented” scholars. Because that money comes out of UIC’s central budget—not each department’s own coffers—the program is the only way for some departments to afford new hires, according to the lawsuit, forcing them to double down on DEI if they wish to remain competitive.
In nearly 40 applications for the program reviewed by the Free Beacon, departments disparaged “White Masculinity,” called for “additional BIPOC/female/nonbinary faculty,” and claimed it would be “immoral” to recruit “underrepresented graduate students” without first hiring professors who “look like them.”
Several also stated that they would target faculty with a focus on activist scholarship. The math department said it wanted a scholar of “race and power in undergraduate mathematics education,” for example. And the biomedical engineering department, which received funding through the program, said that its ideal candidate would “train the next generation of Biomedical Engineers in DEI principles.”
These initiatives had an extraordinary effect on the racial makeup of UIC’s faculty. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of black and Hispanic tenure track professors rose by over 25 percent, according to data from the school’s Office of Institutional Research, while the number of white tenure-track professors declined by 4 percent.
Soon enough, Kleinschmit began hearing from his colleagues that some of the new hires were not up to snuff. It was “demoralizing,” he told the Free Beacon, to see unqualified scholars fast-tracked for tenure because of their race.
In the fall of 2022, Kleinschmit began airing these concerns to top university officials, including UIC provost Karen Colley and the dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs, Stacey Swearingen-White. By February 2023, he had been informed of his impending layoff.
Swearingen-White told him in a meeting that his contract would not be renewed because of budget cuts. But at the same time that those cuts were allegedly being made, the college found the money to hire a series of new administrators, according to the lawsuit, and received funding through the Bridge to Faculty program to recruit a minority scholar. Kleinschmit was the only member of the college who was ultimately let go.
“The Plaintiff repeatedly and thoroughly highlighted the discriminatory nature of the university’s conduct, making him a target of retaliation,” the lawsuit reads. “If Professor Kleinschmit were a member of one of the preferred racial groups, the administration would have quickly found the resources to support his continued employment.”
