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The Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has denied a request by the University of Illinois Chicago to rehear a case it recently ruled on that favored a professor punished for using censored slurs on an exam.

The Seventh Circuit last week “denied en banc review of a panel’s decision to revive the Chicago law professor’s retaliation suit after he was disciplined for including a redacted racist slur,” Law360 reported.

The May 2 decision sends the case back to district court, the latest development in the conflict, which began in December 2020 when law Professor Jason Kilborn included a question containing a pair of censored slurs for African Americans and women in an exam.

“I am absolutely thrilled the precedent is now firmly in place in Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin that public university professors indeed have robust First Amendment free expression rights in their teaching and scholarship, and university administrators who violate these rights face personal responsibility, not shielded by qualified immunity,” Kilborn said in an emailed statement to The College Fix on Wednesday.

“Free expression has been under intense attack from administrators in these states for years now, and I could not be more proud or honored to be the person who confirmed constitutional protections for all of my public university professor colleagues,” he said.

“The battle is, of course, not over,” Kilborn added.

“UIC has wasted $1.3 million fighting this utterly unnecessary fight, having now achieved nothing for this enormous investment, and I will be very curious to see how many more taxpayer dollars they’re willing to burn through in their Quixotic pursuit of further losses,” he told The Fix. “All of this should be entirely unnecessary, but I am eager to continue the fight if UIC officials are not ready to behave reasonably and put this behind us.”

As The College Fix previously reported:

The offending exam question, which Kilborn had used on prior exams, pertained to a hypothetical situation in which an employee quit her job “after she attended a meeting in which other managers expressed their anger at Plaintiff, calling her a ‘n___’ and ‘b___ .’”

After students complained about the question to the law school dean, Kilborn partook in a discussion hosted via Zoom by the Black Law Students Association. During the discussion, Kilborn jokingly suggested the dean feared he might “become homicidal” if he saw a petition criticizing his use of the offending question.

Afterwards, Kilborn was placed on indefinite administrative leave with pay and investigated for creating a racially hostile environment at UIC.

During the investigation, past in-class comments made by Kilborn resurfaced and were subjected to additional scrutiny. These included his colloquial use of the terms “lynching” and “cockroaches” when discussing the relationship between frivolous litigation, plaintiff incentives, and the media, as well as his use of an affected African American accent while quoting a Jay-Z song describing a pretexual traffic stop.

Although Kilborn was eventually allowed to return to teaching, he was denied a 2 percent raise and required to undergo drug testing, a medical examination, and eight weeks of diversity training.

Among his required reading materials for his diversity training was Bobbie Harro’s “The Cycle of Socialization,” which Kilborn noted ironically contains the derogatory term for African Americans used in his exam question, and censors it in the same manner: “White people who support their colleagues of color may be called ‘n—– lover.’”

The case was the recent subject of an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune.

Gerry Regep, a law student at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, argued that the appeals court has shown “public university professors have remedies for legal relief when their First Amendment rights are violated in the classroom setting.”

“The decision reaches far beyond one professor’s law school exam. The question remains: Can a university truly be a marketplace of ideas if a professor risks being sanctioned for using hypothetical scenarios that reflect the messy, uncomfortable realities their students may face?”

“Although Kilborn’s claim may still fail on the merits,” Regep added, “this decision is a win for academic freedom and free speech supporters alike, and may have implications for other pending cases involving university faculty.”

MORE: Appeals court vindicates law professor disciplined for censored slurs on test

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A photo of law professor Jason Kilborn / FIRE YouTube screenshot

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