EXCLUSIVE: AFL Secures Full Reinstatement For Law Professor Who Claims He Was Fired Over DEI Objections

America First Legal (AFL) secured a settlement with Ohio Northern University (ONU) to reinstate a law professor who claimed he was fired because he rejected the university’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) hiring practices, according to a Thursday press release obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller.

AFL argued the university terminated Dr. Scott Gerber, a tenured professor of law, as retaliation for his opposition to the university’s alleged sex and race-based mandates and quotas. (RELATED: Lawsuit Alleges It Took IBM Two Non-White Staff To Replace White Man They Claimed Sucked At His Job)

/9 This is simply an escalation in the culture war. Even tenured professors will no longer be tolerated and will be terminated if they refuse to bend the knee to the current woke ideology.

— America First Legal (@America1stLegal) January 23, 2024

“Dr. Gerber should be commended for his courage in filing complaints about what he perceived as ONU’s consideration of race and sex in hiring professors, which is illegal,” Nick Barry, Senior Counsel at America First Legal, stated in the press release.

“This has cost him years of lost teaching opportunity, reputational harm, and the stress of years of litigation. However, his reward is full vindication. He was never a safety threat. He was nothing but an outstanding professor and scholar who stood on truth,” he continued.

Gerber criticized racial preferences in college admissions and hiring numerous times, including in an opinion piece he wrote for the Cincinnati Enquirer in 2023. He deemed racial preferences the “sacred cow of higher education.”

“For example, jobs are frequently set aside for minorities and women, and conservative and libertarian white males need not apply, or so it seems,” Gerber wrote in the piece.

Gerber acted to prevent DEI hiring practices from taking place at ONU, his 2024 lawsuit stated.

He raised concerns to multiple ONU administrators and filed complaints in 2022 with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, alleging the university violated laws relating to hiring and employment discrimination, according to the lawsuit. (RELATED: It Took Less Than 36 Hours For Trump To Slash Decades Of DEI Bureaucracy)

The lawsuit alleged that campus security and armed police officers “forcibly removed” him in the middle of class on April 14, 2023.

Gerber was taken to the dean’s office where he was told that he could “either resign or face termination proceedings,” the lawsuit alleged. Gerber refused to resign from his position, and the university subsequently brought termination proceedings against him, according to the lawsuit.

“The University’s punishment, which was meted out through a flawed process under which Dr. Gerber had no reasonable means to defend himself, cost Dr. Gerber his job, irreparably tarnished his reputation, and interfered with Dr. Gerber’s ability to obtain comparable employment at another university,” the lawsuit stated.

The university originally argued that Gerber posed a threat to the “physical safety of … faculty, staff, and students,” according to Gerber’s lawsuit. The university’s president, Melissa Baumann, allegedly published a letter accusing Gerber of “moral turpitude,” the lawsuit stated.

As a result of the settlement, ONU officially acknowledged that Gerber did not pose a security threat, did not act with “moral turpitude” and that he gave “outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service” during his employment at ONU.