Appeals Court Upholds Dismissal of Former Librarian’s Lawsuit Against Ohio State

A federal appeals court today rejected an appeal by a former librarian at Ohio State University at Mansfield who said he had been forced to resign from his job in 2007, a year after his recommendation for required freshman reading stirred up a storm of criticism on the faculty. The former librarian, Scott A. Savage, who was a member of the committee picking the reading assignment, recommended a book, David Kupelian’s The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom (WND Books, 2005), that, among other things, alleges the existence of a gay conspiracy against society.

The book was not selected, but Mr. Savage drew complaints from faculty members and others about his suggestion. The lower-court judge, William O. Bertelsman of the U.S. district court in Columbus, Ohio, found no basis for Mr. Savage’s lawsuit against the university, ruling in 2010 that he had not been punished for his recommendation or penalized over the complaints, and had chosen to resign by himself. A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit agreed today, upholding every finding of Judge Bertelsman.