Editor’s Note: The following is an article originally published on the College Fix on May 2, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
Zack De Piero, a professor suing Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) for alleged racial discrimination, plans to appeal after a district court granted a motion for summary judgment in March, dismissing his lawsuit.
De Piero, who worked at Penn State’s Abington campus, said he was basically forced to resign in 2022 due to a series of disputes with other employees regarding the institution’s }diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) practices. His complaint alleges that he was “individually singled out for ridicule and humiliation because of the color of his skin.”
“If you’re being bombarded by discriminatory propaganda on a monthly, weekly or sometimes daily basis, it takes its toll on you,” he told the College Fix in a Zoom interview. “That really does wear you down.”
De Piero’s lawyers, Mountain States Legal Foundation Senior Counsel James Kerwin and General Counsel William Trachman, said they plan to file an appeal this month. Speaking with the Fix, Kerwin expressed confidence that the legal standards they will rely upon in the appeal are well established.
“There are similar cases around the country that are percolating up to the courts,” he said. “It’s a fairly new development … They’re starting to have some success and judges are starting to understand that these really aggressive DEI practices in the workplace can include colleges and universities.”
Kerwin said the main difference between these cases and previous discrimination suits is that they tend to be brought by non-traditional plaintiffs.
“When the Civil Rights Act and all these things were happening in the ‘60s, there was a lot of discrimination in the United States … Now there’s different kinds of discrimination, but the law has not changed,” he said.
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“Unfortunately, this shouldn’t be the case, but the race of my client seems to make a difference. One simple way to look at the allegations and the proof in this case would be to ask if the races were reversed, and you just swapped black for white… I think it’s obvious that it would not have been dismissed on summary judgement. There would be a jury trial on this,” he told the Fix.
The Fix emailed the university’s media relations office, as well as several of the defendants named individually in the case to ask for their response to the lawsuit, but none responded.
On March 6, U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone granted Penn State a motion for summary judgement, agreeing with the university’s argument that De Piero did not present “sufficient evidence” to support his discrimination claims.
Beetlestone dismissed the charges on the basis that “no reasonable jury could determine that the twelve incidents at issue here constitute a ‘constant drumbeat of essentialist, deterministic, and negative language’ that warrants his hostile work environment claims to go to trial,” according to a copy of the ruling provided to the Fix.
In the suit, De Piero alleges that the university hosted a series of race-based training sessions in the fall of 2021, including “White teachers are a problem” and “The Myth of the Colorblind Classroom: White Instructors Confront White Privilege.” In one session, De Piero told the Fix, the provost told non-black professors to hold their breath “a little bit longer” to “feel the pain” that George Floyd felt.
“It was coming from a lot of different angles,” De Piero said. “It was certainly coming from the DEI office. It was coming very aggressively from my immediate supervisor… you pretty much had to sit there and take it.”
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In an October 2021 meeting, he said, “I knew the crosshairs were on me, I knew this was very intense. I was as cool and calm as I possibly could have been and I simply asked, ‘That’s a pretty extreme charge, can you please help us understand what you’re asking us to do?’ …And for asking that question, I was hit with bullying and harassment charges.”
De Piero said after two faculty members filed a bullying and harassment complaint, he spoke to the associate director of the Penn State Affirmative Action Office, who allegedly told him, “It was not appropriate for you to ask for examples.”
In the lawsuit, De Piero also alleged the university encouraged race-based grading practices to ensure “consistent grades for students across ‘color line[s].’” His supervisor, Liliana Naydan, allegedly told him that “racism is in the results if the results draw a color line.”
According to the complaint, Naydan encouraged him to “assure that black students can find success in our classrooms” and to “assure that all students see that white supremacy manifests itself in language and in writing pedagogy.”
Following these incidents, De Piero sued Penn State and several of its employees for allegedly violating Title VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Pennsylvania Human Relations Act, all of which forbid, in some form or another, the creation of a hostile work environment on the basis of race. Additionally, his complaint lists First Amendment retaliation as a cause for action, alleging, “De Piero engaged in constitutionally protected speech and was subjected to an adverse employment action as a result.”
Attorney Kerwin told the Fix, “Importantly, there is the retaliation for speech claim, which is also very, very important in this case. That claim was dismissed early on by the judge, but that is a ruling that we are definitely appealing.”
“There’s a long line of case law from the Supreme Court that says … when you’re the government and it’s your employee and you take an action against them because of what they’ve said … that’s, in essence, the government suppressing free speech,” he said.
When asked how he might advise professors in a similar situation, De Piero encouraged them to “say what you have to say, say what you mean and mean what you say. Do what you think is right.”
Image: “Penn state old main summer” by George Chriss on Wikimedia Commons
