He reported racism. A 0-27-0 tenure vote came next, his lawsuit says
A Black professor alleges Northwestern denied him tenure in retaliation for reporting racism, according to his new lawsuit.
Charif Shanahan, a tenure-track English professor, sued Northwestern University and four colleagues on May 12 in federal court in Chicago. The complaint alleges the school denied him tenure in retaliation for reporting race discrimination, through a process he says relied on false claims, withheld documents, and decision-makers he had asked to be recused.
The filing, in the Northern District of Illinois, brings claims of race discrimination and retaliation under 42 U.S.C. § 1981, defamation per se, and breach of contract.
Shanahan is described in the filing as a mixed-race, light-skinned Black man of Moroccan and Irish descent, and the first Black faculty member in Northwestern's Litowitz MFA+MA Graduate Creative Writing Program to come up for tenure in the English Department. His scholarly record, by the university's own account, was not in dispute. According to the complaint, Northwestern's Ad Hoc Committee described him as "an extremely promising and indeed brilliant poet."
The dispute, as the filing tells it, is about what happened after he reported discrimination.
During the 2021-22 academic year, Shanahan alleges, a graduate student engaged in a pattern of misconduct directed at him, including yelling at him in his office and recruiting classmates. According to the complaint, a fellow graduate student announced a plan to "get [Plaintiff] fired" and encouraged others to file complaints. The filing says Department Chair Katharine Breen later described that fall's course evaluations in writing as "racially denigrating" and "racist."
Shanahan alleges he reported the misconduct repeatedly to Chris Abani, then Director of Creative Writing. According to the filing, Abani told him to "man up" and "be more African," among other things. Shanahan says that response placed the cause and the solution for the student conduct on his own race.
In February 2023, the complaint says, Shanahan formally reported discriminatory and retaliatory behavior to Dean Adrian Randolph. He took FMLA medical leave in March and April. When he returned in May 2023, the filing alleges, Breen withdrew the department's previously confirmed support for his early tenure bid, citing "a pattern of issues."
In October 2024, the department voted 0-27-0 against tenure. According to the complaint, not one of the 27 colleagues voted yes. Not one abstained.
The vote was justified, the filing alleges, by a seven-page letter dated October 24, 2024 that Shanahan says contained false claims. According to the complaint, the letter said he told admitted MFA applicants he "regretted their admission" and that they "did not belong in the MFA program"; that on three separate occasions, advanced students asked to be reassigned to a different adviser for their honors theses; and that he had advocated for the firing of teaching-track colleagues. Shanahan alleges none of those things happened.
The filing notes the letter itself stated "any one of these events could have been misreported or susceptible to an alternate explanation." According to the complaint, the department published the letter anyway and never asked Shanahan about any of the claims before doing so.
The complaint also alleges that faculty named as respondents in Shanahan's discrimination and retaliation complaints, including Breen and Abani, took part in the tenure vote after his recusal request was denied, with the Dean's Office citing a policy exception.
A separate strand of the case centers on a February 14, 2023 memorandum from Dean Randolph that, the complaint says, set the fall 2021 course evaluation scores in the context of the student misconduct and was designated for distribution to anyone evaluating Shanahan's teaching. The filing alleges the memo was not given to the department, the Ad Hoc Committee, the Committee on Tenure and Promotion, or any evaluating body, and was absent from the personnel file Shanahan received on May 14, 2025.
Northwestern denied tenure on April 25, 2025, precluded Shanahan from completing the internal tenure appeal on July 24, 2025, and dismissed his petition to the Board of Trustees on September 23, 2025, according to the filing. The department then recommended against his three-year reappointment on October 24, 2025.
He filed a Charge of Discrimination with the Illinois Department of Human Rights, cross-filed with the EEOC, in December 2025.
For HR professionals, the complaint reads as a list of process concerns Shanahan says compounded into retaliation. A written recusal request was denied. A contextualizing memorandum was, the filing alleges, kept out of his file. Unverified student complaints were, the complaint says, published without anyone asking the employee for his account. Adverse actions, the filing alleges, followed in close sequence to each protected complaint.
The case also tests personal exposure for individual managers. Breen, Abani, Trethewey and Martinez are named in their individual capacities for defamation, with the complaint alleging they coordinated false statements during department deliberations and republished them each time the letter moved to another evaluating body.
The allegations have not been tested in court. Northwestern and the individual defendants have not yet filed a response, and no court has ruled on the claims.
