America First Legal (AFL), in partnership with Ashbrook, Byrne, Kresge & Flowers, won the case of Dr. Scott Gerber, a law professor, settling with Ohio Northern University (ONU). He is fully reinstated and completely vindicated.
They claimed he was a threat to faculty, staff and students because of his objections to racist DEI programs.
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.
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.
In 2023, ONU fired Dr. Gerber, a tenured law professor, after he objected to the University’s race-based hiring practices. When he was terminated, ONU sent campus security and armed local police officers into his classroom to forcibly remove him.
He was humiliated for not bending a knee to the woke, anti-white, anti-American ideology. It was the cancel culture taking on a more aggressive form.
Now, after nearly two years of litigation, ONU has agreed to reinstate Dr. Gerber and allow him to retire at his rightful faculty rank, with all his benefits intact. As part of the settlement, ONU formally acknowledged that:
- Dr. Gerber was never a public safety risk to any member of the ONU community.
- He never acted with moral turpitude.
- He provided “outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service” throughout his tenure at ONU.
- The university’s president, Melissa Baumann, allegedly published a letter accusing Gerber of “moral turpitude,” the lawsuit stated. She had to recant and state that he gave “outstanding teaching, scholarship, and service” during his employment at ONU.
“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. 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,” said Nick Barry, Senior Counsel at America First Legal.
America First Legal is proud to have achieved such a favorable settlement for Dr. Gerber and remains committed to holding accountable any institution that seeks to silence dissent.
Read the settlement agreement here.
Read more information about the case here.
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