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A judge has dismissed a University of Texas at Austin professor’s lawsuit against Texas A&M University. The white male professor had sought to prohibit A&M from considering race or sex in hiring decisions—before he applied to work there.
Richard Lowery, a tenured associate professor of finance in UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, filed the lawsuit a year ago in federal court, seeking to make it a class action. Since then, as Judge Charles Eskridge noted in his ruling Friday, the Texas Legislature passed Senate Bill 17.
SB 17, which takes effect in January, will ban race- and gender-based affirmative action in institutions’ hiring as well as “trainings, programs or activities designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation.” Texas A&M argued that makes Lowery’s case moot, and Eskridge agreed.
“SB 17 prohibits exactly what Lowery alleges is taking place,” Eskridge wrote. But he also criticized Lowery’s lawsuit for other reasons, including the fact that he hadn’t yet applied to A&M.
The judge wrote that, under Lowery’s reasoning, “any putative plaintiff could sue a potential employer without ever applying, simply upon allegation the posited discriminatory practices deterred application. That’s not enough.”
Lowery’s separate federal lawsuit against his current business school’s leaders is continuing. In that case, he alleges they threatened his career because he denounced UT Austin’s funding and support of “left-wing” causes and tried to draw state lawmakers’ attention.
Eskridge wrote in Friday’s ruling that Lowery “says that he’s interested in leaving the University of Texas because he dislikes the current leadership and has been the target of intense criticism for his outspoken conservativism.”
The Texas Tribune reported earlier on the dismissal.
