DePaulia
The
2017 Pacemaker Award Winner
Volume #103 | Issue #2 | Sept. 17, 2018 | depauliaonline.com
Hanging
in the balance
PAU L E DE | TH SKI NOW ARA AB
Three blocks away from DePaul’s College of Law, years of disagreement spilled over into a federal courthouse on Friday. Professor Terry Smith, an African-American labor law and voting rights scholar, is seeking $3 million in damages in a civil rights lawsuit filed against the law dean Jennifer Rosato Perea, former DePaul president Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider and the university in February 2018. Smith’s lawyer argued before a federal judge that the university should discontinue its ongoing attempt to terminate Smith for what it describes as a pattern of bullying and harassment until the suit is resolved. Eric Rumbaugh, who is representing DePaul in the case, argued that the school should not have to wait to move forward with firing Smith because his continuing “incivility” is an “existential threat” to the law school. Smith, who began teaching at DePaul in 2010, said he suffered “significant abuses” in retaliation for his advocacy for racial diversity within the law school and his outspokenness on what he sees as racial issues. He has been critical of the lack of diversity within the College of Law (COL); in a recent incoming class of more than 230 students, only nine were black, according to the complaint. Smith, currently one of only two tenured black male professors at the law school, the other being the law librarian, holds the title of Distinguished Research Professor of Law. He taught at Fordham University for 16 years and also worked at Kirkland & Ellis, the highestgrossing law firm in the country. “The university will continue to vigorously defend itself, Dean Rosato Perea and former President Holtschneider against the lawsuit filed by Professor Smith,” a spokesperson
ALIS
Editor-in-Chief
for DePaul said. “We continue to be disappointed that we have to resort to litigation to address DePaul’s retaliation against my client,” said Smith’s attorney, Jerry Bramwell. Smith’s complaint alleges he has been frozen out of the law school’s power structure. In June 2010, he sought a position on the University Board on Promotion and Tenure, but thendean of the law school John Roberts told the Faculty Council Committee on Committees, which he chaired, that no one from the law school was interested in serving on the board, according to the complaint. In March 2014, Smith said he tried to get on the law school’s Dean Search Committee, which consisted of law faculty, alumni and other community members. According to the complaint, he was nominated to sit on the committee by law professor Sumi Cho, a colleague and frequent ally of Smith’s on racial issues who Rosato and other law faculty have framed as a coconspirator. When a list of nominees for the committee were forwarded to the acting provost, Patricia O’Donoghue, the two white professors who compiled the list, Susan Thrower and Steven Resnicoff, “arbitrarily exclude[d]” Smith and Cho from the list, according to the complaint. Thrower and Resnicoff forwarded a list of 10 names to the provost that included two junior black faculty who had been at the college for less than three years and eight white faculty, according to the complaint.
ANN
By Benjamin Conboy
IA
African-American law professor fights termination amidst ongoing civil rights lawsuit against DePaul
See LAW SCHOOL, page 4
Tenured profs. to be offered buyouts ahead of SNL restructuring By Carina Smith News Editor
The School of New Learning (SNL) will be facing reorganization in the next year, getting rid of many unique aspects of the school in favor of creating a new model for its adult learners. In a post published on Sept. 7 by DePaul’s communications newsletter Newsline, Provost Marten denBoer said that SNL would undergo a “reorganization, renaming, and rebranding.” In the article, denBoer said that starting on July 1, 2019 the school will be renamed School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS) and that a new faculty and staff model would be developed in order to provide more “flexibility” to the new SPCS model.
XAVIER ORTEGA | THE DEPAULIA
In order to create the new model, denBoer said the university would be offering voluntary buyouts to the tenured faculty members and retirement incentives to staff who were eligible. The announcement of the buyouts comes just months after DePaul’s sixyear plan said they would take steps toward expanding the number of tenured professors.
The announcement also comes after years of continuing changes to SNL. DePaul closed down its O’Hare satellite campus this summer, where SNL had taught a number of classes for years. A new interim dean, Don Opitz, began in July of this year, and enrollment numbers for new students decreased. According to their 2016 enrollment summary report, SNL’s total enrollment was only at 994 students,
which is a 44 percent decrease from their enrollment numbers in 2013. Faculty members have remained skeptical of the reasoning for the change in SNL’s current layout, especially as the college has received recognition across the country for its unique approach to adult learning through their competencybased program, which allowed for adult
See SNL, page 8