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A Conservative Professor's Discrimination Suit

Virginia State University is a historically black university located just outside of Petersburg. It was the United States' first fully state-supported four-year institution of higher learning for black Americans (an oft-repeated point of pride which I first heard when visiting VSU, back when I worked for the SMV). My problem with that, of course, has nothing to do with the students being black, and has everything to do with asking why the state is using my tax dollars to support higher learning for anybody at all. But that's not even the issue I wanted to discuss today.

It has been alleged more than once over the years that VSU discriminates against conservatives on its own faculty. The latest case is Jean R. Cobbs, an outspoken conservative black woman who was a professor at Virginia State University with more than 27 years of tenure when, in January 2005, she was fired for reasons that look to me pretty unfounded. She sued the school, its president, and its provost, claiming that her termination was simply retaliation for her testimony in another suit, years earlier, in which the school and its president were accused of racial discrimination.

VSU has offered Cobb $600,000 to settle the suit out of court. A Goy and his Blog notes that this benefits the university, its president, and its provost in that they do not have to admit any wrongdoing or shell out any of their own money in order to make both Professor Cobb and her lawsuit go away:

the settlement guarantees an end to the public controversy. Much better to rob VSU’s students of a half million dollars in funding than to let the internet, mainstream media and public-at-large get hold of the details of this case. Think what a can of worms that might open!

Well, yeah, I live less than half an hour from VSU, and I've heard this case mentioned exactly zero times on the local TV and radio news. The Richmond Times-Dispatch carried one story, and it hasn't been mentioned much elsewhere.

I don't think, however, that discrimination against conservatives in academia is so systemic as to warrant some sort of Academic Fairness Doctrine or Equal Time provision. Nor do I support Rammage in his grudge against Atlas Blogged reader feminist mom. But I wish that Professor Cobb was able to wring a public acknowledgement of wrongdoing out of VSU - and getting paid in a manner that punishes the wrongdoers personally, instead of with tax dollars. As it is, she stands as yet another example of how an academic career can be broken by politics. If we must be saddled with state universities, then this behavior shouldn't be tolerated in them.