The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has filed an unfair labor practice charge with Ohio’s employment relations board alleging that Cleveland-Marshall College of Law gave satanic pay raises of $666 to a group of professors because the professors are union rabble-rousers.
This seriously happened. The Daily Caller is not joking.
TaxProf Blog broke the story and has helpfully provided a PDF link to the actual legal document.
The complaint was originally filed in August. It alleges that the law school’s dean, Craig Boise, retaliated against eight faculty members because of their union involvement by giving them merit raises for 2013 and 2014 of either $666 or $0.
Four raises were possible for all professors at Cleveland-Marshall: $5,000, $3,000, $666, and $0. The factors determining each prof’s raise were scholarly activity, student evaluations and service.
The eight complaining professors say they received their paltry raises of either $666 or, in two cases, nothing at all in spite of “exemplary scholarship and teaching scores.”
The fact that 666 also happens to be the number of the beast also rankles the professors and the local AAUP chapter.
“In effect Dean Boise has called AAUP’s organizers and AAUP Satan,” the complaint asserts. “Dean Boise’s actions are a poorly veiled threat in opposition to AAUP’s organizing and concerted activities.”
Susannah Muskovitz and William E. Froehlich are the attorneys behind the complaint against Cleveland-Marshall. Froehlich somehow manages to spell his own name wrong on the signature line.
TaxProf Blog also refers to a memo authored by one of the eight activist faculty members. The memo calls the dreaded number 666 “a universally understood symbol of the Antichrist or Devil — one of our culture’s most violent religious images.”
“Implicitly, but unmistakably and obviously intentionally,” Boise “used his powers to set faculty salaries as an occasion to brand his perceived opponents as the Antichrist,” the unidentified instructor wrote.
The memo was distributed to all of Cleveland-Marshall’s professors.
In its response to the unfair labor practice charge, the law school blames math for the diabolic salary increases. School officials also maintain that the petitioners “cannot point to a single directive, or even a reference, from the Dean to a ‘666’ or satanic merit pay amount for certain allegedly union-active faculty members.”
In its annual ranking, U.S. News pegs Cleveland-Marshall 119th among the 203 ABA-approved law schools in the United States—somehow tied with four other schools.
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