U.S. District Judge Manish Shah dismissed the Title VII case because the plaintiff had no employment relationship with the university.
Dr. Aaron Douglas, who never worked at or applied for a job at the university, claimed it disproportionately rejected articles by African-American scholars.
According to court papers, the Journal of Political Economy, which is published by the University of Chicago Press, rejected his submission in 2014, several years after he retired as a natural resources economist for the U.S. Department of the Interior. The suit said that because of a “paucity of peer-reviewed journal publications, he failed to secure tenure at the University of California Berkeley in 1971 and to be promoted at the Interior Department.”
Since his retirement in 2011, he has posted his CV online and applied to “several unidentified universities,” court papers said.
The suit alleged job discrimination and sought a tenured appointment as full professor and guaranteed acceptance by the journal of at least 20 articles. It alleged that the university’s discriminatory practices in selecting articles for publication results in “a major adverse impact on the promotion opportunities of himself and hundreds of similarly situated African Americans with doctorates in economics.”
U.S. District Judge Manish Shah dismissed the case because Douglas has no employment relationship with the university.
“To be liable under Title VII, a defendant must be the plaintiff’s employer, prospective employer or joint employer or be affiliated with the employer, prospective employer or joint employer,” Shah said.
