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Former University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor Larry Chavis alleged in a federal lawsuit filed last week that university officials retaliated against him in declining to renew his contract earlier this year.
In April, The Assembly reported that officials in the Kenan-Flagler Business School secretly recorded several of Chavis’ lectures as part of a review of “class content and conduct”—an apparent violation of the business school’s IT guidelines. Some faculty wondered whether administrators routinely recorded lectures or targeted Chavis, an outspoken critic of the business school’s leaders and a proponent of racial diversity initiatives who had taught there since 2006.
Christian Lundblad, Kenan-Flagler’s associate dean, wrote in a May evaluation that the review was sparked by student complaints that Chavis focused too much on Indigenous issues in his international development course. A handful of students also said they felt “physically unsafe” after Chavis said he was going to “burn this bitch down,” referring to the business school building.
But emails reviewed by The Assembly showed that a business school official had signed off on Chavis’ plan to incorporate Indigenous issues into his course years earlier. And end-of-semester evaluations showed that while many students thought he rambled, most gave him excellent ratings.
Before the controversy over the recorded classes, Lundblad had assured Chavis in a February email that his contract would be renewed. But the associate dean appeared to change his mind afterward, telling Chavis in June that his contract would not be renewed at the end of that month. No explanation was given.
Chavis’ lawsuit alleges that his termination was a response to his “public criticisms of UNC’s recording of his classroom lectures” and “his long-standing history of challenging UNC’s lack of faculty diversity and its prior discriminatory conduct toward him.”
His attorney, Artur Davis, pointed out that a month before Chavis’ employment ended, the UNC Board of Governors eliminated the system’s diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
“There’s been a gathering backlash against institutions that promote and believe that equality and diversity are important features of their student body,” said Davis, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who is now a partner at HKM Employment Attorneys. “What you see is a change in the climate now in institutions like UNC, and it’s hard to run from the conclusion that Larry Chavis and his 18-year career were victims of that change in the climate.”
UNC-CH did not respond to a request for comment on Monday.
According to the lawsuit, Chavis began seeking senior-level roles in Kenan-Flagler around 2015, but the school’s then-dean, Doug Shackelford, told him he was too opinionated. Instead, Chavis, a Lumbee Indian, was steered to become director of the UNC American Indian Center. He took that post in 2017.
By 2020, however, Chavis had become critical of what the lawsuit terms “racial equity issues” at UNC. He complained about “anemic” funding for the American Indian Center and said he’d been marginalized at Kenan-Flager, losing promotions to “white guys who are less qualified,” while administrators ignored white professors’ “racially insensitive practices.”
Chavis eventually resigned from the American Indian Center, but his complaints prompted an Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office investigation in 2021 that led UNC to expand recruitment of racial minorities, the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit alleges that when Chavis applied to be assistant dean of the undergraduate business department in 2022, an associate dean told him he was “too controversial” for the position. Chavis also said his salary fell behind his peers; despite having nearly two decades of experience, he ranked among the lowest-paid professors in the business school. In 2023, he was admonished for forbidding students in his class from wearing clothing bearing the insignia of sports teams like the Kansas City Chiefs that he believed exploited Indigenous stereotypes.
He said he was warned that his “actions could generate political backlash and attract scrutiny from what an administrator referred to as the ‘conservative legislature,’” according to the lawsuit. He was also told that his teaching contract, which normally ran for two years, would be shortened to one.
A year later, the university declined to renew his contract altogether.
“This about-face put him in an incredibly difficult predicament,” Davis said. “Because in most universities, if you’re dealing with nontenured faculty, the tradition and the best practice is to let them know as soon as possible so they can enter the job market for the next academic year. That didn’t happen with Professor Chavis. So he, in effect, learned about his termination too late for him to acquire employment for the 2024–2025 academic year at any quality institution.”
UNC offered Chavis six months’ pay—about $106,000—as severance. But Davis said that doesn’t fix the damage the university has done to his career.
“He is not going to have the kind of opportunities that he deserves to revive his career,” Davis said. “It is devastating to a member of the academy to be fired. Devastating for someone in his position to lose his job, and that’s going to impact his ability to get hired at an elite institution—and salaries in academia are very much connected to the level of your institution.”
Jeffrey Billman reports on politics and the law for The Assembly. Email him at jeffrey@theassemblync.com.