CHICAGO — University of Illinois at Chicago law professor Jason Kilborn said he never could have imagined that a final exam that contained a racial insult to an imaginary woman of color in a pretend civil case would create a campus firestorm that would divide colleagues, lead to his ouster and placement on leave for more than a year.
The tenured professor’s exam question on the December 2020 quiz involved a hypothetical scenario where a Black female manager filed a work discrimination lawsuit after a meeting where colleagues called her a ‘n-----’ and ‘b----,’ shorthand versions of a slur and an insult. Students in his Civil Procedures II course were asked to analyze the account of an imaginary former manager who made the profane statements.
Days after the exam, Kilborn’s boss reached out for a Zoom meeting to discuss the use of the question. The professor offered to send a note of regret to his class and had another Zoom meeting, this time with the local Black student association to discuss concerns.
Nearly a year later, Black law students held a rally and were joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson in demanding administrators fire Kilborn.
Kilborn said his professional reputation took a steep tumble into a thorny political thicket that led him to file suit late last month in U.S. District Court in Chicago. His fall included anonymous claims that he previously referred to racial minorities as “cockroaches,” an investigation by UIC’s Office for Access and Equity that found fault with his quiz language, and a public call for his termination. While school officials disregarded the cockroach rumor, the school’s OAE office found that Kilborn’s quiz question had violated school policy and was “harassing based on race.”
The university responded by canceling all of Kilborn’s classes for that entire semester. He was barred from going to UIC’s campus, having any informal meetings with colleagues and students or participating in university events.
The rumors came as a shock to the 49-year-old native of northern Iowa. He said he’s never had tension in his classroom in 20 years as an educator.
Before being allowed to return to law classes by fall 2022, Kilborn had to agree to satisfactory completion of a battery of required training courses that included an eight-week diversity course and weekly 90-minute sessions with a diversity “trainer,” according to his federal lawsuit.
The multicount suit also claims that five school officials denied him due process to face his accusations and improperly removed him from work, violating his First, Fifth and 14th Amendment rights.
A UIC spokeswoman declined to comment, saying the university doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
In addition to returning to his regular academic course load, Kilborn said he hopes his suit could help forge a firm framework of procedures to resolve sensitive matters in academic settings that’s fair to both instructors and students.
“We have to come up with a policy that allows us professors to do what we need to do and yet recognizes the students need to have some degree of comfort, but acknowledging that it’s going to be uncomfortable sometimes,” Kilborn said. “Let’s find a better way to react to that. A university, of all places, has very clear obligations to the First Amendment and academic freedom and due process and they have just run roughshod over all of these things here.”
Kilborn’s 14-month journey has drawn national attention from legal scholars, supporters of academic freedom, bloggers and pundits during a time of heightened scrutiny of public education and college curriculums regarding topics of race, history and revisionism.
The recent firing of longtime Mother McAuley Liberal Arts High School social studies teacher Mary DeVoto for repeatedly using the N-word during a class discussion involving team mascots is a recent example of discipline against an educator for word choice.
Pundits have also decried UIC’s response as an attempt to appease overly sensitive students. In a scathing recent Washington Post op-ed, columnist George Will derided UIC’s response as “campus cowardice” and compared Kilborn’s compulsory sensitivity training to citizen reeducation campaigns by socialist regimes like the Khmer Rouge and Maoist China.
Kilborn has defended himself in the press during his leave, saying his fight didn’t involve ideology.
“This is not a left versus right issue. The issue is extremism ... and I’m perfectly willing to stand up against extremism on either side and say both have to leave us alone in the middle,” Kilborn said. “Our job is to educate people, and the First Amendment and due process stands to protect our attempts to do that.”
Some in education and legal scholars criticized UIC’s actions, calling it an overreaction and a witch hunt that could create a chill that would impede their ability to teach. Last November, Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law professor Andrew Koppelman wrote a commentary in the Chronicle of Higher Education criticizing UIC for improperly punishing Kilborn partially on debunked rumors against him.
The following month, the nonprofit Academic Freedom Alliance sent a letter supporting Kilborn to interim UIC law school dean Julie Spanbauer — one of the suit’s five defendants — claiming the university committed “a grave violation of academic freedom” in retaliating against him.
Among Kilborn’s supporters is Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor and director of the school’s Center for Law, who has posted blogs in support of Kilborn’s ordeal and who said he hopes Kilborn’s lawsuit will force UIC administrators to apologize and reinstate him.
“If (Kilborn) is successful, as I hope he will be, this will make clear that university administrators cannot pretend to care about ‘diversity’ by terrorizing their faculty when a student mob congregates, virtually or in reality,” Leiter told the Chicago Tribune by email.
“Kilborn’s exam question, which started all this, was wholly appropriate as any competent law professor in America could tell you. All the later allegations, which Professor Koppelman has shown are bogus, resulted because of the fake controversy about the exam question,” Leiter wrote.
The subject has nonetheless created a political divide within Kilborn’s insular legal academic world and, he said, tarnished his image in an industry where reputation among peers is of the utmost importance. He said some colleagues have come out against him, joining calls for his termination, something he said he never expected.
The dejection he felt was amplified by a familiar sense of malaise and melancholy brought about by the pandemic, isolation and troubling current events.
“It’s been absolute hell,” Kilborn said. “The biggest part of the hell for me has been being a pariah in my community. Really the only thing that a law professor has … is your reputation, and my reputation has been completely devastated.
“The isolation of COVID, all of the things that we’re seeing on TV, I’ve been feeling all of that, also. And then to be ripped out of my ordinary environment where I’ve lived for the last 20 years as a law professor ... with no explanation as to why this is happening … has just been totally debilitating emotionally.”
Kilborn said he’s hopeful that his suit will return him to class and set a framework on how to resolve such future entanglements but worried whether his reputation was beyond repair.
“If you disagree with something one of us said, let’s have a conversation about it, because the appropriate reaction to speech which you disagree with is more speech. You don’t get to just summarily yank us out of class.”
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