University reappoints dean who violated civil rights of senior faculty member despite overwhelming vote of no confidence from faculty and students

I don’t know a lot about this situation, but it sounds kind of bad:

The University of Colorado Boulder has reappointed CU Law School Dean Lolita Buckner Inniss for another three years despite records showing faculty and student dissatisfaction and a university investigation that found she retaliated against a professor.

An investigation conducted by CU Boulder found on Feb. 19, 2024, that Inniss violated university policy by retaliating against Professor Paul Campos after he reported discrimination. CU also reached a settlement with Campos after he brought a lawsuit against the university.

“On one level, it’s completely outrageous,” Campos told the Daily Camera.

“If you essentially have your institution admit you’ve been found liable for violating the civil rights of one of your tenured faculty members, and not only did (the university) settle (the lawsuit) for a significant amount of money but you get removed as that person’s immediate supervisor … it’s kind of amazing someone would get reappointed under those circumstances.” . .

When asked why Inniss was reappointed despite the finding of retaliation, CU Boulder spokesperson Nicole Mueksch said that the “issue was resolved.” She declined to say what, if any, disciplinary action was taken against Inniss, adding that the university doesn’t comment on personnel matters.

Dean Inniss is the first dean in the history of the University of Colorado who has been found liable by the university’s own internal investigative process to have violated federal civil rights law by retaliating against a complainant. Needless to say, this process is more or less intentionally designed to avoid such a finding in regard to the acts of high ranking administrators, but when you send an email to somebody telling them that you’re sanctioning them for complaining about discrimination, there’s only so much a bureaucracy can do.

“Dean Buckner Inniss remains committed to creating a climate of fairness and non-discrimination within Colorado Law,” Mueksch wrote in an email to the Daily Camera.

That’s nice.

The bottom line here is that 65 full time faculty were given an opportunity to approve The Dean’s reappointment, and a total of 18 did. (25 voted no, six formally abstained, and 17 didn’t vote at all, probably because of some crazy irrational paranoid fear that they could be subject to some sort of retaliation.)

In addition, the leaders of student groups had their opinions solicited — there are a lot of groups so this included a lot of students — and the sentiment against reappointment among them was roughly 90%.

“Some community members expressed fear to speak their minds and felt a fear of retaliation,” according to the report.

“Comments expressed concerns with the OIEC finding that Dean Inniss had engaged in retaliation.” That’s a reference to the university’s Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance’s finding in Campos’ case.

Dean Inniss’s academic speciality is anti-discrimination law, which is the kind of detail you would leave out of a novelistic satire of academia, because it would be way too over the top. BTW, the only sanction the ex-provost levied against her — he was required to sanction her under university rules — was telling her to take a class in how not to retaliate illegally against your employees.

Faculty and staff expressed concerns about Inniss’ trustworthiness, honesty and ethics, along with reports that she had been negligent in her duties as dean, according to the report. Concerns reportedly included disengagement from the law school, a lack of communication, a habit of canceling meetings on short notice and being absent from law school events.

It’s completely symptomatic that, after Dean Inniss was excoriated in an open faculty meeting by many people for simply not doing many of the most basic aspects of her job, her response to last week’s email from the new provost announcing her reappointment was . . . nothing.

Even a crappy AI program would know that in this circumstances you’re supposed to produce a four-sentence email to the faculty, expressing how you’re honored and humbled by your superiors’ decision, how you’ve learned a lot from the reappointment process and in particular from faculty and student feedback, and how you plan to incorporate these insights over the next four years etc. I mean I could draft that in literally 90 seconds, but then I’m not paid $500,000 a year to fail to do the most basic and easiest parts of my job.

Not surprisingly, the Dean named “diversity” as her central goal and key accomplishment in her self-evaluation, which is a bit awkward, given that, as was pointed out by many people to the ex-provost, the faculty lost several outstanding non-white faculty in the first four years of her tenure, mainly because she’s terrible at all aspects of her job,. very much including making an effort to retain outstanding non-white faculty:

In the report, some people were happy about diversity being a signature issue for Inniss, but others were concerned “that the Law School has lost numerous diverse faculty who are leading scholars, and there were minimal efforts to retain these faculty. Comments reflected concern that those faculty were pushed away.”

Ahmed White, who was a CU Boulder law professor from 2000 to 2024, said those observations from faculty and staff resonated with him and his experience.

He’s now a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has felt valued and had a positive experience.

“I’m at Wisconsin because it’s a great school, and I have great colleagues and I have a great position here,” White said. “But for many years, I felt CU to be a very unwelcoming place for a Black man like myself, no doubt about that.”

His issues at CU Boulder began before Inniss was hired in 2021 but did not improve under her leadership, White said. Despite bringing his concerns to Inniss, Moore, and the Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance, he said, little was done to try to retain him.

He said the university did not propose bringing his salary up to the level of his colleagues who had equal or less experience and expertise.

“I did not feel particularly valued there … they made it easy to leave,” he said.

Something not mentioned in the story is that the law school is a complete financial basket case at the moment. Real net tuition has fallen by nearly 50% over the past 15 years, while the school has gone on a non-stop hiring spree — approved by the same administrators who reappointed Dean Inniss of course — that has left us with a full-time faculty of 69 this coming semester. That’s 60% larger than when I was hired, while the student body has grown by 10%. We now have one of the lowest faculty-student ratios of any law school in the country, along with Yale and Stanford, who a lot of people are saying have significant private endowments of some sort or another.

The financial situation is so bad that, despite the enormous subsidy, equal to 104% of its self-generated revenues, the law school gets from central campus — this in practice means from all those “useless” humanities and social science departments, many of which haven’t been allowed to make a new full-time hire in years (the law school made eight in 2025) — the law school was unable to pay faculty and staff raises out of its regular budget this spring, and had to raid gift funds in order to do so. Regental and university rules don’t allow us not to pay the regent-approved raises, so as soon as we can no longer raid this particular piggy bank we’ll have to start laying people off, probably next year, or at the latest the year after that.

A colleague and friend of the feminist persuasion points out to me that the new provost is a woman, and probably not coincidentally an economist, so she will apparently be tasked with cleaning up the fiscal mess made by her male predecessors in the central administration, which according to my friend is something of a society-wide pattern.

Another colleague — someone I barely know — was sufficiently outraged to write me the following:

Therein lies the problem for an administration with no vision and no values but who just flitters about worried about potentially negative headlines. They end up doing things that create even worse headlines for themselves, and pissing off an entire faculty for good measure. I can’t believe reappointment was even a remote consideration at the outset — something I know people expressed in person to [Provost] Russ Moore, emphasizing her retaliation against you and what everyone should have considered a game-over faculty vote. That he and [Chancellor Justin] Schwartz put us in this position, in the most ridiculous possible way selling out a brand new provost, is outrageous and an abdication of their responsibility to lead this institution. This whole place is a clown show.

I realize of course that far greater outrages are happening at every moment in the wider world, but we must all cultivate our hydroponic gardens.

Speaking of which, the reappointment of Dean Inniss is in flagrant disregard of ABA standards for law schools. (The ABA is the official accrediting agency for law schools, which means its approval is necessary to keep the federal loan gravy train running even as it’s being partially derailed by the Trump administration. ABA approval is also a requirement for a law school’s students to be eligible to take the bar in almost all states).

The ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/standards/2024-2025/2024-2025-standards-and-rules-for-approval-of-law-schools.pdf

provide in part:

Interpretation 203-1

Except for good cause, a dean should not be appointed or reappointed to a new term over the stated objection of a substantial majority of the faculty.

The ABA provides an online form for filing complaints regarding violations of the Standards and Rules.   Complaints can be filed either under the complainant’s name, or anonymously.  The online for can be found at this link:

https://americanbar.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6EyIu2uPwc3RTp4