(The Center Square) – The Liberty Justice Center filed a lawsuit against the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) on behalf of a professor whose contract was terminated after he criticized the university’s hiring programs.
Reilly Stephens, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, explained professor Stephen Kleinschmit would speak out against illegal hiring practices by the university.
“He was told repeatedly, ‘don’t rock the boat, Stephen. Don’t pick a fight about this,’ and he said, ‘look, this is wrong.’ Eventually he [Kleinschmit] had complained too many times to the point where they let him go,” said Stephens. “He was the only person laid off because he was the only white guy. He wasn’t meeting their affirmative action goals, and so, therefore, he had to go.”
Stephens explained UIC is a state actor and therefore constitutionally required to respect the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.
“The Civil Rights Act is a separate statute that says you can’t discriminate against someone on the basis of race or sex in employment, among other things. This is not technically a Civil Rights Act case at the moment,” said Stephens. “So the government and government institutions are bound to follow the Fourteenth Amendment, which bans racial discrimination. But private people are not covered by the Constitution. So private people, absent of the Civil Rights Act, can discriminate as much as they want.”
Kleinschmit v. University of Illinois Chicago was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division, on Feb. 10, 2025.
The suit seeks financial compensation for the earnings and benefits Kleinschmit lost due to UIC’s actions.
Stephens said the university framed the professor’s contract not being renewed as a layoff for budget cuts.
“But then they reposted a new job posting in the department. When he went to apply for it himself to get his old job back, it was made clear to him that he was not the right skin color to apply for his old job back,” said Stephens. “We think it’s fairly clear that the budget cut explanation is fake, frankly.”
The Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit also asks the court to order the university to halt “racially discriminatory hiring and retention practices.”
“They ended up in a situation [where] some of these new hires [whom Kleinschmit opposed], they couldn’t teach normal classes because they didn’t actually have the skills required to teach,” said Stephens. “They could only teach subjects that were about race. They couldn’t actually teach the core classes. People like [Kleinschmit] had to pick up some of that slack.”
UIC requires all academic and non-academic units to create “Advancing Racial Equity” plans, which according to the suit, codifies their intent to engage in racially discriminatory behavior and establish racial quotas in academic and administrative hiring.