“It’s infuriating because these universities are so arrogant and so disrespectful of taxpayers’ wishes and, frankly, their money.”
So says Michael Thad Allen, a former tenured history professor who found a second career as a lawyer, defending undergraduate students and faculty against “phantom” accusations from what he calls “the sky above the campus clouds.”
No matter how outrageous an academic institution’s behavior may become, most people don’t want to go through the “emotional penalty of standing up to a stupid university that is clearly out of control,” he said. But the number of plaintiffs has kept him busy in recent years.
“In 2007, we didn’t have a passionate activist HR department. We didn’t have an office of diversity, equity and inclusion. … As a professor, I had never even heard of Title IX except as it applied to women’s sports,” Allen said in a recent interview with The College Fix.
Since then, Allen’s clients have included a professor who was reported after being overheard asking a Filipino student whether he spoke Spanish or Tagalog; one who was investigated after allegations of sexual harassment for hanging a signed poster of a famous director in his office; and one who was accused of unprofessional conduct after inviting his mother into his office for help writing a grant proposal.
“These surveys are just trying to embarrass professors for the sake of investigation,” Allen said. “It’s like a full employment program for HR idiots and DEI bureaucrats.”
He began considering a career change in the mid-2000s, while working as a historian at Georgia Tech.
At the time, he had enjoyed some success as an academic: his research had been noticed and his book, “Genocide Business,” detailing the use of slave labor in Nazi concentration camps, had received some praise.
But Allen said his department was in disarray after internal infighting and that for family reasons he had to maintain a home in New England in addition to his home in Atlanta, which he said would be extremely difficult to maintain on the salary of a humanities professor.
Allen said he then “interviewed at some really depressing educational institutions” while searching for a new teaching job in New England, before deciding to attend law school and graduating from Yale Law School in 2010.
Allen’s high-profile clients include Zach De Piero, a former English professor who is currently suing Pennsylvania State University, Abington, for alleged civil rights violations related to the content of mandatory DEI training materials.
Another client is University of North Texas music professor Timothy Jackson, whom Allen described as “an extremely ill-timed man to make the case in July 2020 that the entire Western classical music tradition should not be viewed as systemically racist.”
In 2021, Allen also successfully defended a University of Connecticut student who was unfairly disadvantaged by an accusation of sexual assault.
But Allen acknowledged that his path to his second calling “may not be as glamorous as you might think.” Specializing in litigating against universities was not originally the plan, he noted.
After graduating from Yale, Allen took a job at a prominent law firm in Hartford, Connecticut, in 2015, where he defended academic institutions against claims that they could be held liable for the actions of staff members who may have been guilty of sexual abuse.
Allen doesn’t deny that there were real victims of crime in some of these cases, but he points out that it may be a stretch to argue that the perpetrators’ academic institutions are responsible, especially if the institutions were unaware that the abuse was taking place or failed to respond appropriately after discovering it.
A few years later, Allen said, he moved to a smaller law firm where he did a lot of Title IX work, often drawing on his experience in higher education and his knowledge of how academic institutions operate from the inside out, learning how to run the law firm as a business and how to “attack university excesses.”
Shortly thereafter, in 2018, Allen founded his own firm, later merging it with that of current partner Samantha Harris. Today, Allen said, about a third of his practice remains Title IX-related work.
“Most often, accused students come to us seeking legal representation and assistance with administrative proceedings before the university’s camouflage court,” he said.
He said he and his firm plan to seek damages for their clients, sue the university to have their records expunged, and “represent clients as victims.”
Another big part is First Amendment studies, which often relate to academic freedom.
“Private universities obviously don’t have free speech,” he said, “but many private universities guarantee academic freedom and free speech through their policies, and in many states, those policies are enforceable as contracts.”
But Allen said the specific types of cases he and his office see in the field vary depending on the “forces majeure” that exist at any given time.
“When I first started, free speech cases were tied to the Me Too movement,” he says, “so when allegations were made and there was some suggestion that women weren’t necessarily telling the truth, it would start a mob on campus.”
“The killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 has sparked a new wave of free speech litigation, including accusations of racism,” he said, adding that he described some of them as completely “illusory.”
Allen said that while it did not involve one of his firm’s clients, the controversy at Yale Law School in which a student of Cherokee descent was accused of racism for offering to serve fried chicken at a party was a classic example of hallucinated accusations of racism.
“The ‘N-word’ lawsuits have become all the rage,” he said. “Somewhere, someone says the ‘N-word,’ usually a white student.” But Allen noted that in the lawsuits he’s seen, the students “were not trying to insult African-Americans” but rather “were singing a rap song.”
“Of course, the Israel-Gaza issue is a new First Amendment issue,” he said.
Fifteen percent of the cases his office handles involve academic misconduct, Allen said, and the rest of his office’s work is comprehensive, including a new category of cases he calls “investigations for the sake of investigation.”
Read more: White professor’s ‘hostile work environment’ claim can move forward: judge
Image courtesy of Allen Harris Law
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