The Chronicle: DISCRIMINATION-SUIT VICTORY FOR MALE PROFESSORS
A judge has decided that 40 white male professors who brought a discrimination suit against Northern Arizona University 11 years ago are entitled to $1.4-million in back pay and raises. The professors alleged that the university had discriminated against them in a pay-equity plan by giving raises of up to $3,000 each to certain minority and female professors, but giving no raises to them.
At the same time, one of those professors, George H. Rudebusch, together with a group of about 200 other white male professors and 80 female professors, filed a class-action reverse-discrimination lawsuit against the university’s president at the time, Eugene M. Hughes.
The suit against Mr. Hughes was later dismissed, and that dismissal was upheld by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in 2002. But the appellate judges, who considered both lawsuits together, held in their opinion that the 40 professors were entitled to a jury decision on whether the raises given were higher than necessary to make up for past inequities.
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