- The 4th US Circult Court of Appeals has affirmed a trial judge's ruling favoring five North Carolina State University faculty members sued by a colleague for discrimination.
- Professor Madhusudan Katti, tenured since 2023, claimed that he was initially denied tenure in 2020 because of racial discrimination and retaliation for "nontraditional" teaching methods.
- The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals split 2-1 in ruling against Katti. The dissenting judge would have allowed race discrimination allegations to proceed against four of the five defendants.
A split panel of the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a trial judge’s ruling favoring North Carolina State University faculty members in a professor’s discrimination lawsuit. Madhusudan Katti claimed that illegal discrimination blocked him from earning tenure in 2020.
NCSU later granted Katti tenure in 2023. He now serves as director of Science, Technology, and Society and associate professor in the Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program for Leadership in Public Science and in the Department of Integrative Humanities and Social Sciences, according to his NCSU online bio.
Yet Katti argued in a federal suit that the university’s original decision to deny him tenure was based on racial discrimination and retaliation against his “nontraditional” teaching methods. Katti sued five NCSU officials involved in the original 2020 tenure decision.
US Chief District Judge Richard Myers dismissed Katti’s lawsuit. The 4th Circuit’s 2-1 decision Tuesday affirmed that ruling.
“The first time Madhusudan Katti sought tenure at North Carolina State University (NCSU), his application was denied. The next time — three years later — it was approved,” Judge Harvie Wilkinson wrote for the majority. “According to Katti, the ‘only’ plausible inference from that experience is that the first tenure decision was an act of discrimination and retaliation.”
“The district court disagreed, and so do we,” Wilkinson added. “Katti’s own complaint made clear that there were a host of legitimate reasons for the first tenure decision. To infer foul play from Katti’s conclusory allegations would be nothing more than speculation. The result would be to impair academic freedom, which promises the university the ability to ‘determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach,’ free from court intervention.”
NCSU hired Katti, an “Indian man,” in 2016. After a probationary period, he first applied for tenure in June 2019. A faculty committee voted, 6-5, not to recommend him for tenure. His college dean and the university provost “ultimately came to the same conclusion” as the committee, Wilkinson explained.
“Undaunted, Katti proceeded to reapply. In April 2023, he was granted tenure,” the majority opinion added.
After receiving tenure, Katti filed his suit claiming that the provost, dean, department head, and two other faculty members engaged in conduct that “was unlawful in several ways” during the first tenure process, Wilkinson wrote.
The complaint alleged one colleague’s “personal malice” and another’s “false, overblown, or untimely criticisms” in performance reviews.
“The crux of Katti’s amended complaint was the allegation that a white professor would have fared better than he did in the same tenure process,” Wilkinson wrote. “While he asserted it numerous times, though, the complaint included just two structured comparisons between himself and white colleagues. The first was a chart … that showed that five white colleagues, all hired between 2013 and 2017, were granted tenure while Katti was not. The second was a chart … that showed that a particular white colleague was granted tenure despite publishing fewer articles, delivering fewer conference presentations, and securing fewer grants than Katti.”
Courts are “not well-positioned to second-guess” university tenure decisions, Wilkinson explained.
“While it is true that tenure decisions can reflect insularity or personal favoritism, the judgment at play remains ‘scholarly,’ not legal,” he wrote. “No legal rule can resolve whether a theory about bird population dynamics in urban areas is more innovative than one about the role of chestnut trees in indigenous communities. Courts thus work from a deficit which even expert testimony would be challenged to entirely overcome.”
“Even if we were well-positioned to review these decisions, doing so would create fissures in the bedrock of higher education: academic freedom,” Wilkinson added. “Such freedom ‘thrives not only on the independent and uninhibited exchange of ideas among teachers and students, but also, and somewhat inconsistently, on autonomous decisionmaking by the academy itself.’”
“The upshot of these principles is not that there is no role for courts in reviewing claims of tenure discrimination,” the majority opinion explained. “There is no categorical ‘university exception’ to the civil rights laws. Our role, however, is a limited one. We are ‘narrowly directed’ to consider whether the denial of tenure was due to unlawful animus.”
Katti’s allegations “fall well short” of what he needed to show for his case to proceed, Wilkinson explained. “Each of the bases on which Katti asks us to infer intentional race discrimination is highly speculative.”
“In fact, an ‘obvious alternative explanation’ for Katti’s denial of tenure emerges from his complaint: the decisionmakers who reviewed his first tenure application believed he was not qualified,” the majority opinion added. “Katti evidently believes he was qualified, but that by itself suggests nothing about whether they did. His conjecture is not enough to push his claim ‘across the line from conceivable to plausible.’”
The majority agreed Katti’s First Amendment claims about nontraditional teaching methods were “unsubstantial.”
“It is possible that teaching methods, in another case, could fall within the zone of protection afforded by the First Amendment to speech related to ‘scholarship and teaching.’ But that is a question we need not now address, because Katti disclaims the scholarship and teaching label altogether,” Wilkinson wrote.
One defendant “believed Katti’s ‘loose and reactive’ presence in the classroom caused ‘friction’ with students.” The same defendant noted that “Katti received low student evaluation scores.” The “only reasonable inference” the 4th Circuit majority took from that part of the complaint was that a colleague “was a critic of Katti’s teaching quality, not his teaching methods.”
“[W]e express no position on the merits of Katti’s original tenure application,” Wilkinson concluded. “Katti may have been a fine teacher and scholar at the time he first applied for tenure, or he may not have been.” The five NCSU faculty members he sued “were entitled to exercise their discretion in making that determination. All parties involved may now turn their attention from this court to the noble enterprise in which they were heretofore engaged — that of education.”
Judge Julius Richardson joined Wilkinson’s opinion.
Judge Toby Heytens agreed with the majority in rejecting Katti’s First Amendment complaint. But Heytens would have allowed the professor to pursue his race discrimination complaint against four of the five defendants.
“My biggest concern with the district court’s analysis is its statement that, because ‘discretionary decisions such as whether to grant tenure necessarily implicate a host of subjective factors,’ it is ‘exceedingly difficult for a plaintiff’ like Katti ‘to show disparate treatment.’ That was error,” Heytens wrote.
“There is no ‘subjective factors’ exception to the Equal Protection Clause or 42 U.S.C. § 1981 — in the academy or elsewhere,” he added. “Many employment decisions involve ‘complex judgments and numerous decisionmakers.’ And courts (including this one) have shown themselves fully capable of adjudicating employment discrimination claims by professors.”
Heytens wrote that Katti’s allegations about the promotion of a white colleague “are sufficient to withstand a motion to dismiss.”
