A Potentially Revolutionary Case: A Conservative College Professor Suing A Liberal University For Discrimination

By John Hawkins
TPNN Contributor

The Left has turned colleges in America into propaganda factories that are just as geared towards cranking out liberal voters as educating students. In order for this system to be feasible, it requires rank discrimination against conservative professors for their political beliefs in positions where politics should be irrelevant. If Teresa Wagner eventually prevails in court, it could start a fire that won’t stop burning until it torches liberals at colleges all across America.

A federal jury believed the University of Iowa’s law school illegally denied a promotion to a conservative Republican because of her politics, former jurors told The Des Moines Register.

However, despite their beliefs that political discrimination took place, jurors said they felt conflicted about holding a former dean personally accountable even though they wanted to hold the school itself accountable.

“I will say that everyone in that jury room believed that she had been discriminated against,” said Davenport resident Carol Tracy, the jury forewoman.

Meanwhile, attorneys for the part-time law employee, Teresa Wagner, on Tuesday filed a motion for a new trial in the case that scholars agree could have national implications in what some argue is the liberally slanted world of academia.

The jury’s belief that Wagner was a victim of discrimination is significant as the case heads toward a retrial, scholars following the case said.

The case centers on Wagner’s claim that she was passed over for a full-time teaching position by the university because of her advocacy and work with groups that oppose abortion and same-sex marriage rights.

…. A mistrial was declared on the allegation that Wagner’s equal protection rights were violated and a not-guilty verdict was returned on the count against the law school’s former dean for political discrimination.

“She was discriminated against but you don’t go against the dean,” said juror Don Mayes, a registered Democrat from Davenport. “The dean can only hire if the faculty approves you and the faculty denied it, so the dean had no say-so about it.”

Wagner’s attorney, Steve Fieweger, said after the trial that federal laws required that the dean had to be named as the responsible party in the lawsuit. He said that allows the university to shift responsibility for its wrongdoing.

…Fieweger said that in a second trial, Wagner’s legal team would attempt to make it more clear to jurors why they had to name the dean rather than the school as a defendant.

If this case is won, right-of-center professors that already have jobs will be emboldened, more conservatives will be hired, colleges will have to start taking ideological diversity more seriously, Republican state legislators will have a hook to use to threaten the funding of liberal public universities and hopefully, it will produce a flood of lawsuits against liberal universities by the professors they’ve discriminated against. That might provide conservatives with our first opportunity in a long time to roll back the Left’s takeover of America’s higher education system.