Month: June 2019

They couldn’t wait to get cracking on it, either. Dude:

Breaking: UA officials took The name of Hugh Culverhouse Jr off the University of Alabama school of law sign pic.twitter.com/3wZDyU19C6

— Tim Reid (@reidreporterguy) June 7, 2019

Out of curiosity, I googled the law school. The name has already been scrubbed from the website.

They have my admiration. Political principle is hard enough to stick to when there’s not an eight-figure payday on the table. Imagine how hard it is when there is. The number in the headline actually undersells U of A’s sacrifice here, in fact: The $21.5 million was part of a larger $26.5 million pledge that’ll now go unfulfilled. And it came from the school’s single largest donor, Hugh Culverhouse Jr., which means the university has likely lost a substantial future donor stream as well.

The tiff appears — I stress, appears — to stem from Culverhouse’s call last week for a boycott of the state and its institutions, including the law school that bore his name, over its new abortion law. “I don’t want anybody to go to that law school, especially women, until the state gets its act together,” he said on May 29, adding “When you say sweet home Alabama, you can kiss my ass. There isn’t anything sweet about it until this absolute abomination is done with.” The wrinkle is that at no point has the university itself claimed that the abortion law or his boycott call is the source of its dispute with him. They insist that it’s due to him meddling with its operations. “Donors may not dictate University administration,” said U of A in a statement also published on May 29. They’ve been vague on what Culverhouse did to meddle, but he admitted to the AP that he told administrators his donation should be used to admit more students and award more scholarships — although he says he thought that dispute had been resolved.

Either way, we’re in a strange situation this afternoon in which the university has made an exceedingly dramatic financial gesture to demonstrate that it doesn’t want Culverhouse’s patronage any longer while … refusing to say why, specifically. It’s Culverhouse, not U of A, who claims this is about abortion, abortion, and nothing but abortion. He whined in a statement about the school somehow trying to “silence” him by refunding his money:

“I expected this response from UA. I will not allow my family’s name to be associated with an educational system that advocates a state law which discriminates against women, disregards established Federal law and violates our Constitution. I want to make clear that I never demanded that $21.5 million be refunded and wonder if the University is attempting to silence my opinions by their quick response. I will not be silenced. Once again, I call on students to protest and reconsider their educational options in Alabama. I also appeal to out-of-state and international businesses to consider the consequences of conducting business in a state that discriminates against women and defies constitutional law. These boycotts and acts of resistance should remain in effect until the State of Alabama reverses the illegal anti-abortion statute.”

He was more colorful in an interview with the AP:

After the trustees’ vote, the younger Culverhouse said that he and father had donated to the university over the years in part to rid Alabama of a certain stereotype: “We are the land of the backward, we are hicks, we lack the sophistication to see two sides to an argument.”

“What have you done Alabama? You have effectively put a 12-gauge in your mouth and pulled the trigger,” Culverhouse said. “You have reinforced that horrible stereotype that my father and I have tried so hard to eliminate.”

Why won’t the school acknowledge that they’re punishing him for the boycott call, at least? Obviously they’re not opposed to taking money from someone who’s pro-choice. Culverhouse’s views can’t have been a secret when he made that $26.5 million pledge. The university was probably understandably peeved that he was giving them bad press by encouraging students to boycott despite the fact that they had nothing to do with the new abortion law’s passage, so they told him to hit the bricks. Culverhouse is eager to tie this dispute to abortion politics, I assume, because it makes him a sort of pro-choice martyr among his likeminded friends. But why is the school so reluctant to admit its motives?

Is it, as one expert told the AP, because it fears the dispute “could pressure more politically liberal donors to cut off support to the university”? Rejecting Culverhouse’s money over the boycott call might lead other pro-choice donors to withhold they money in a sort of sympathy strike. As painful as it was for U of A to part with $26.5 million, it could get worse if they’re viewed as hostile to abortion supporters. There may be some sort of legal issue too if the school is seen as picking sides in an abortion debate given that U of A is a state actor and operates as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, although I’ll leave it to legal eagles to hash that out, if so. Presumably it’s not actionable discrimination for a state institution to decline to accept a gift from you because of your political viewpoint. Imagine that — a First Amendment right to make the state take your money.

James Damore was fired by Google back in August 2017 after he wrote a memo suggesting the predominance of male engineers at the company was partly the result of innate differences between men and women rather than discrimination. In January of 2018, Damore filed a lawsuit alleging the company discriminated against whites, males, and conservatives. Today a judge denied Google’s third attempt to have the lawsuit dismissed. From the San Jose Mercury News:

The ruling by Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Brian Walsh means the case, which Damore exited late last year in favor of arbitration, can move forward into the discovery phase…

The court denied three different Google motions to dismiss the lawsuit. Now the plaintiffs can request access to internal Google documents to try to support their allegations, which also include some people being “denied employment because of their actual and perceived conservative political activities and affiliations, and their status as actual or perceived Asian or Caucasian male job applicants,” according to the lawsuit.

As mentioned above, Damore exited the lawsuit but two other men are still pursuing it with the same attorneys. The Hollywood Reporter describes the backstory of the current lawsuit:

Damore, along with ex-Googler David Gudeman, in January 2018 filed a class action lawsuit against the tech giant. They claim the company is an ideological echo chamber and it “singled out, mistreated and systematically punished and terminated” employees who disagreed with the majority view about “diversity,” “bias sensitivity” and “social justice.”

They later amended their complaint to add as plaintiffs two men who were rejected for jobs at Google, Stephen McPherson and Michael Burns, and another employee who ultimately voluntarily dismissed his claims…

Damore and Gudeman in November agreed to arbitrate their claims against Google, which left in open court only the claims from McPherson and Burns that they were passed over for jobs because Google unlawfully prioritizes hiring women and certain minorities to the detriment of male, white and Asian applicants and discriminates against politically conservative applicants.

In his ruling today, Judge Walsh did suggest that he “has doubts regarding the viability of the putative Political Subclass.” However, he’s willing to allow the plaintiffs to at least make the case for it after they’ve had a chance at discovery. Harmeet Dhillon, the lawyer representing McPherson and Burns released a statement:

At the hearing, the court denied Google’s motions for judgment on the pleadings, to strike, and its demurrer. Now the case moves into the discovery phase, allowing the plaintiffs’ attorneys to seek access to Google’s internal documents, as well as other potential evidence to support their allegations, in anticipation of a motion for class certification.

Will there actually be documents to support discriminatory hiring decisions? To be clear, I don’t have much doubt that the company’s culture actively discourages conservatives males, but the nature of any culture is that the rules (usually) aren’t written down for outsiders to examine. Instead, they are absorbed from social cues and through private conversations. I suspect that’s how things work at Google, but who knows. Maybe the progressive monoculture is so arrogant that people have actually written memos expressing their biases. It will certainly be interesting to see what the discovery process turns up.