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Rejection X 100 = Age Bias

August 1, 2011, 3:09 pm

Nicholas J. Spaeth has been a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford, managing editor of the Stanford Law Review, law clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, state attorney general for North Dakota, and visiting law professor at the University of Missouri. Now add to that list plaintiff in an age-bias suit against Michigan State University’s law school and EEOC complainant against more than 100 others.

In a complaint filed last week in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Mr. Spaeth — born in 1950 — is accusing Michigan State’s College of Law of violating the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. He says that Michigan State didn’t grant him one of the 24 interview slots at an Association of American Law Schools cattle call in Washington, D.C., last October, and that the three people whom the law school ultimately hired as faculty members had credentials that were inferior to his own. Mr. Spaeth is seeking appointment to a teaching position at the law school, compensation for future lost wages, and other damages.

But wait. There’s more.

One of Mr. Spaeth’s lawyers, Lynne Bernabei, told The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times that Mr. Spaeth had previously filed complaints with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the more than 100 other law schools that did not offer him an interview. “Of those complaints, between 30 and 40 had been dismissed and the rest were still pending,” the blog states.

The Michigan State suit could be just the beginning. Ms. Bernabei says her firm may add more defendants to the suit or file related cases. —Don Troop

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  • debaron

    No problem with this article, but what caught my attention was how it was captioned by an editor in the afternoon email update: “Marybeth Gasman argues that we have become too casual in our remarks about Asians.” To me, that caption undercuts what Gasman is saying. Or perhaps it underscores what she says only too well. To paraphrase Tonto in the old joke, “What do you mean, ‘We’?”

  • 11191774

    I think it’s entirely reasonable to be offended by what Ms. Wallace said because it unfairly singled out Asians, while at the same time being in agreement that talking on a cell phone in a library is rude and annoying to others, regardless of the ethnicity of the offender. It’s the connection of the two that is really puzzling here.

  • 5768

    It could be of great benefit for us to better educated as to the tonal inflections inherent and necessary to Asian speech. Lacking an appreciation at even the intellectual level, it is too easy to parody it or any language with sing-song, rhyming syllables, thus mocking it. A PBS television program on this topic would be to the benefit of those of us–myself included–who lack such an appreciation and would thus benefit those who speak the language.

  • jffoster

    1. You may mean human _species_.
    2. Most dogs I’ve known are more trustworthy than most people I’ve known, but can’t use the internet.
    3. As to your “Jesus” paragraph, I’m not sure why you adduce it here. Maybe something about driving loud cell phone talkers out of the library.

    Or was that money changers out of the temple?.

    At any rate, Miss Wallace doesn’t owe to me any apology. Nor to you either, probably.

  • 11144703

    Marybeth, I think this column is exemplary, indeedone of the best I’ve read.

    One question: what are the supposed “motives of Asian professors who teach at historically black colleges and universities”??? I’ve never heard of such a charge and I can’t imagine what such motives would be. I hope you address them in a future column.

  • tee_bee

    Wow, a thoughtful post, followed by a needlessly confrontational and haughty response. Thanks for doing your part to promote reasoned discourse.

  • manoflamancha

    With respect,Katisumas (what the blazes does that handle mean?), you are making logical leaps everywhere! How can you possibly know the detailed make-up of foreign students at UCLA? We court Japanese students for the money? Desperately need foreign students for their high tuition? You sir or madam are one seriously sick puppy. Yes, I am indeed one of the LATTER…try English spelling 101. Or better still, pack up your bags for Bagdhad!

    South Park is parody, of folks like you:)

  • manoflamancha

    Oh, stop it!

  • joyce8

    So glad to see this!  The common story about the rewards of late-in-life career changes is a myth.   In many careers, private, academic, and government, there is a lockstep career path and if you are not on it by about age 30, forget it.

  • janeer1

    This is an important issue, particularly for tenure-track positions, where it is near-impossible to get an interview if you are over 40, maybe younger, despite having much stronger credentials, experience, and references. Age discrimination is rampant in higher education. It is a complex issue, involving concern about applicants being more accomplished than tenured faculty; recognition that they are not junior in the same sense as 20-somethings; aging professoriate (sense that young faculty are needed to balance that out), and ungrounded assumptions that it takes a lifetime to establish a reputation.  But a great deal of evidence needs to be collected to pursue this issue in the courts, and that data is, of course, kept secret. Someone would need to make this their research mission.

  • megginson

    I appreciate joyce8′s comment (and clicked the Liked button to so indicate), and janeer1′s that follow, but I do have to add that there are enough examples of late-in-life career changes out there that we shouldn’t discourage people from trying for them if they don’t like their current situation and see a chance to advance. Anecdotes don’t prove anything, but my own significant career changes happened at ages 29 (that first one being from industry into academia), 35, 44, 54, 56, and 62 (as I made a significant change to another academic area and have got a good response to doing so). On the other side of the coin, my father tried to make a significant change in career at about age 50, and hit a stone wall, quite possibly due to his age and despite stellar credentials. (Yes, I’m biased, but I think the evidence would bear this out.) As janeer1 says, it’s a complex issue, and it will be interesting and informative to see how Spaeth’s suits play out.

  • dopefein

    I can only speak ancedotally, but I know of two recent colleagues, over the age over 40, who just got tenure-track jobs.  Yes, there is age discrimination out there, I’ve witnessed it.  But I believe it to be more complex than just rejecting someone for his/her age.  There is the issue of fit, of the persons connection to the students he/she will be teaching, to his/her colleagues, motivations for changing positions/careers.  The hiring process involves lots of moving parts; not sure we can boil down all decisions to something like age discrimination or sexism

  • unlvlaw

    A few caveats: first, I do not speak (or type, in this instance) in any official capacity on behalf of the law school at which I am employed or the university of which it is a part; second, although I have previously served on my law school’s appointments committee, I have not done so recently and am not on the committee for the academic year that’s just underway; third, I am (well) over 40; fourth, despite having achieved a solid national and growing international reputation among my colleagues and peers in my areas of expertise, many more law schools have not offered me jobs over the years than have offered me jobs.

    As dopefein suggests, law school hiring is a process involving many moving parts.

    Mr. Spaeth’s educational “pedigree” (Rhodes Scholar + Stanford Law + Managing Editor of the Stanford Law Review + U.S. Supreme Court clerk) is impressive; the facts that an author search using his name on Westlaw reveals no published law review or bar journal articles and a Google Scholar search led to one book, published in the 1990s for the Conference of Western Attorneys General, on which Mr. Spaeth is listed as chair of the editing committee but not as one of the book’s two chief editors, is not impressive.  (His website at the University of Missouri School of Law — http://law.missouri.edu/faculty/directory/spaethn.html – did not mention any publications either.)  If he truly has no academic publications having been out of law school for more than 5-10 years, he is virtually a non-starter for most law school hiring committees — no matter what other credentials he has to offer.  (Sad perhaps, but true.)

    The fact that Mr. Spaeth is a former state attorney general is impressive; the fact that he is the former attorney general of North Dakota — and that he left that post nearly 20 years ago — is less impressive.

    According to http://www.ndcourts.gov/court/lawyers/03647.htm, Mr. Spaeth is no longer licensed to practice law in North Dakota; most law schools insist that faculty have an active license to practice law in some state.

    There are 100 or more good candidates for every available tenure-track teaching position at an ABA-accredited law school.  The easiest thing a hiring committee can do is say “No, thanks.”  There appear to be one or more reasons to do so in Mr. Spaeth’s case.

    As an aside, I wonder whether Mr. Spaeth chose to sue Michigan State because Harold J. Spaeth is an emeritus professor of political science there with some past or present affiliation with the law school. 

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