A professor and ordained pastor who was kicked off his campus two years ago for opposing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” initiatives has settled with Concordia University Wisconsin in a confidential agreement, his lawyer told The Federalist Tuesday.
Philosophy professor Greg Schulz “alleged they breached the contract by violating his academic freedom, and he believes he’s been satisfactorily made whole,” said Dan Lennington, deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute of Law and Liberty, a nonprofit public interest law firm that took up Schulz’s case on behalf of free speech. When he was booted off campus without warning in February 2022, Schulz still had five years left on his tenured contract.
After Schulz published an article criticizing his and other campuses’ use of race and sex as hiring criteria, acting university president William Cario ordered campus security to ban Schulz from campus, Schulz and Lennington told The Federalist then. Schulz couldn’t even clean out his office or access his campus email, he said.
Several lawyers argued this clearly breached Schulz’s contract with Concordia. That contract required that all firings be voted on by the university’s board of regents and that tenured professors have access to a detailed dispute resolution process before any adversarial actions. CUW has not responded to a Federalist request for comment.
The situation became a minor uproar in the church body in control of Concordia, the 1.8-million-member Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (of which this author is a communing member). Pastors, professors, and church members across the denomination expressed concern publicly
