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The now-former University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor whose classes the business school secretly recorded, and whose contract the university didn’t renew after he publicly complained about that and earlier issues, is suing.
Larry Chavis, who was a nontenured clinical professor, filed the lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina against both Chapel Hill and the board of the UNC system. He’s alleging the university retaliated against him for publicly criticizing the surreptitious recordings and its track record on diversity.
An associate dean told Chavis that the Kenan-Flagler Business School began recording him after receiving “some reports concerning class content and conduct,” but the university hasn’t said why it ultimately didn’t renew Chavis’s contract. A spokesperson for Chapel Hill said the university was aware of the lawsuit but wouldn’t comment further on pending litigation.
Chavis said he was told in June that his contract wouldn’t be renewed for this academic year, despite an associate dean telling him four months earlier that it would be. “The reversal of the plan to renew Chavis’s contract came after months of overt public criticism of Kenan-Flagler in print, broadcast and social media,” the suit says.
“The timing of Chavis’s firing creates a clear inference that the exercise of his First Amendment speech rights and his denunciation of discriminatory conduct caused UNC to end Chavis’s 18-year career at the business school,” the suit says.
Chavis, a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, had complained to the university about pay discrimination and about less qualified white candidates being chosen for associate dean positions over him, the suit says. It says he “continued to have ambitions for an academic leadership role, but he was continually steered toward roles related to his ethnicity,” and a former dean of the business school told him “he was no longer viewed as a viable candidate for an associate dean’s role because he was seen as too opinionated.”
