Lawsuit: Diversity policy blocked professor's tenure at Pitt

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(Legal Newsline) – The University of Pittsburgh was too concerned with promoting diversity hires than the most qualified candidates under a previous provost, a federal lawsuit filed last week claims.

Chemistry professor Daniel Sadowsky, a white man hired on a tenure track, alleges in a July 27 lawsuit that ex-provost Ann Cudd rejected his tenure despite unanimous approval from the nine-member tenure committee and recommendations from UP-Bradford dean David Fitz and president Rick Esch.

Still, Cudd found fault with his teaching results, the suit says, and an appeal failed July 14, 2023, as two white women and a non-white man were granted tenure. Sadowsky also points to eight assistant professor hires in 2021 that did not include any white men.

“Defendant’s treatment of Professor Sadowsky, the identified tenure comparators, the absence of any White man among the eight announced 2021 Assistant Professor hires, and the subsequent selection of a non-White man to assume Professor Sadowsky’s chemistry-faculty responsibilities collectively support an inference or finding that Defendant applied its employment standards less favorably to White male faculty members,” the suit says.

“As a direct consequence of the denial of tenure, Professor Sadowsky was placed in a terminal faculty appointment and ultimately lost his job.”

The lawsuit includes several quotes from Cudd, now the president of Portland State University, regarding equality in education. She wrote a chapter on the issue in a book published in 2015, including the message that admissions policies “should take into account the need for a culturally diverse elite by taking cultural competence in underrepresented cultures to be a primary form of qualification for membership in the elite leadership group.”

The school’s affirmative action policy stated the University of Pittsburgh “values equality of opportunity, human dignity and racial/ethnic and cultural diversity.”

All this led to discrimination of white men, Sadowsky argues. He filed a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission before filing suit through lawyer Thomas King and Thomas Breth of Dillon McCandless King Coulter & Graham.