Bad Education
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In a case that began with an exam question, the University of Illinois at Chicago canceled a law professor’s classes last spring and found that he’d violated the campus nondiscrimination policy. The professor, who apologized for the exam question but denied other allegations against him, would have been back in the classroom this fall, were it not for a long-planned sabbatical.
Now that he’s back on the teaching schedule for this spring, some students say he shouldn’t be allowed back at all. The Black Law Students Association, in particular, is demanding that the professor, Jason Kilborn, be fired. The group has staged a series of protests, including a rally on campus last week that featured the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson.
“Students deserve an environment that’s not hostile,” Jackson said during the rally . “We must act. We will act.”
Ashley Shannon, president of the campus BLSA chapter, who is not a student of Kilborn’s, said during her own speech last week, “We do not feel safe. Students have come together to write demands for the law school, starting with the termination of his tenured professor, stating that tenure is not immunity for discriminatory practices.”
Kilborn, who is white, said that Jackson’s visit to campus was “inspiring” and deserving of attention. But he says the “false accusations against me are awful and should not be disseminated uncritically.”
Kilborn’s case has become about much more than the initial exam question, with some students saying he represents much of what’s wrong with higher education, and Kilborn saying the same thing—for very different reasons.
In addition to who’s at fault, many of the facts of the case are in dispute. The university has accused Kilborn of calling minorities “cockroaches,” based on unnamed student reports, and of “diminishing” an unnamed student’s accent, for instance. Kilborn, meanwhile, says he’s never done any of that.
What did happen, for sure, is that in December 2020, Kilborn wrote the following question into an exam for his civil procedures class, just like this:
After she was fired from her job, Plaintiff sued Employer under federal civil rights law, claiming employment discrimination on the basis of her race and gender. Employer also revealed that one of Plaintiff’s former managers might have damaging information about the case, but no one at Employer knew where that former manager was, since she had abruptly quit her job at Employer several months ago and had not been heard from since. With nothing to go on but the manager’s name, Employer’s lawyer pieced together several scraps of information and concluded that this former manager must be located in a remote area of northern Wisconsin. Employer’s lawyer spent $25,000 to hire a private investigator, who successfully located the former manager in northern Wisconsin. Employer’s lawyer traveled to meet the manager, who stated that she quit her job at Employer after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a “n____” and “b____” (profane expressions for African Americans and women) and vowed to get rid of her...
In a series of interviews, Kilborn said he’d never used this particular example prior to the exam in class discussions, but that he’d included the same question on his civil procedures exam in other semesters, with no incident. He also said that upon learning that this question had upset some students last fall, he subsequently apologized to the class via email. Yet Kilborn said that employment discrimination is among the most common topics of federal civil litigation, so the question was “certainly appropriately contextual. I was also trying to acknowledge the challenges that women of color still face in the workplace and the important role of civil procedure in discovering and addressing these wrongs.” Again, Kilborn wrote the question as it's written above, without spelling out the offensive language.
To this day, Kilborn does not know the identity of most of the students who complained about him to the university, including about the test question. Most of the allegations against him have been voiced, at least publicly, by the BLSA, citing unnamed students.
According to a statement by the BLSA, for instance, one student read the exam question and said he felt like he “no longer belonged at the law school.” Per the BLSA, another student said she’d experienced heart palpitations.
A few days before Christmas 2020, Kilborn’s dean asked to meet with him to discuss the matter, but no disciplinary action was taken at that time. A few days after Christmas, the BLSA posted the statement about Kilborn, explaining the history of the N-word and demanding that the law school adopt “an unambiguous policy with guidelines prohibiting offensive and culturally insensitive language in the classroom by professors,” beginning immediately.
The statement also said Kilborn should step down as chair of the school’s academic affairs committee and any other committee appointments, because “someone who exhibits such poor judgment should not be able to hold an additional position of power.”
The BLSA further asked for a moderated dialogue with Kilborn, and that mandatory courses within the law school be taught by multiple professors, to avoid forced interaction with professors with a “history of bias.”..
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This should be an Onion story but it's not. Students get a teacher suspended and possibly fired, for using daring to use the abbreviation " N_____" as part of an example of evidence of discrimination on an exam.
Apparently, future lawyers now feel unsafe just be looking at "N____" and it causes heart palpitations!
These are the civil rights struggles of 2021.
Maybe some are too thin skinned and too easy to upset to be in law school
Of course this guy is true blue left winger. Didn't help when the woke mob came after him.