From Judge Dan Aaron Polster's decision Friday in Pesta v. Cleveland State Univ. (N.D. Ohio):
This case concerns the Plaintiff's First Amendment rights to academic freedom, freedom of speech, and freedom of association as a professor at Cleveland State University ("CSU"). The Plaintiff alleges that the Defendants violated his constitutional rights when they investigated and fired him for advancing a "genetic hypothesis of the cause of the racial IQ gap" between black and white Americans in a published academic article….
The Plaintiff, Bryan Pesta …, was a Professor in the Department of Management at CSU. Professor Pesta received tenure at CSU in 2010 and promotion to full professor in 2016. In March 2022, CSU fired Professor Pesta….
In August 2019, the Plaintiff co-authored and published in the peer reviewed journal, Psych, an article entitled "Global Ancestry and Cognitive Ability." The article essentially concluded that an IQ gap between white and black Americans was, at least in part, hereditary and the result of genetics. This conclusion is called a "hereditarian hypothesis." … In conducting research for the article, the Plaintiff used National Institute of Health ("NIH") data that consisted of over 9,000 individuals' actual DNA samples. The Plaintiff's article concluded that this data supported the belief that "genetics played a role in the mean differences in general intelligence between White and Black Americans."
The Plaintiff acknowledges that the article "proved controversial." In the aftermath, CSU students and faculty, along with non-affiliated individuals and groups, publicly criticized the article and petitioned CSU to discipline Professor Pesta. One notable critic was Dr. Kent Taylor …. In April 2021, Dr. Taylor—a UCLA Professor of Pediatric Medicine—wrote President Sands and alleged that the article's "[u]se of NIH data for studies of racial differences in this way [was] both a violation of data use agreement and unethical."
