While working from home in November of 2022, I received a large but remarkably light FedEx box containing this letter from Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI) President Adam Cohen:

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is the National Science Foundation (NSF) facility that designs, builds, and operates state-of-the-art radio observatories. AUI is the federally funded contractor operating the NRAO for the NSF, so the more than 500 people working at the NRAO are legally AUI employees. To recruit PhD astronomers in competition with universities, AUI offers tenure-track and emeritus appointments. After more than four decades of service as a tenured Astronomer, I retired in 2021 and became an Astronomer Emeritus.

As federal court records show (Condon v. Associated Universities, Inc), I was terminated without due process—without notice of the charges against me, an opportunity to respond, or a hearing before an impartial tribunal—in retaliation for a September 14, 2022, email I sent to an NRAO listserv that included scientific staff (roughly 140 individuals) and a few members of the broader scientific community, opposing discriminatory race- and sex-based “diversity, equity, and inlcusion” (DEI) hiring policies and programs. More on that email later.

However, unlike the usual depressing reports of suspensions, resignations, terminations, or abject apologies from professors canceled for resisting DEI, this one has a happy ending: I sued AUI for retaliation and won $130,000 for damages plus $79,171.52 to reimburse attorney’s fees.

As DEI expanded over the past two decades, nearly all NRAO employees were terrified into self-censorship. I had long pressed leadership to address the NRAO’s discriminatory practices, confronting administrators well before the September 14, 2022, email with memos and messages detailing instances of discrimination. But lacking substantial corrective feedback, the NRAO administration became more authoritarian and created programs that blatantly discriminated on the basis of race and sex.

For example, NRAO adopted this hiring policy: “If two candidates for the same position have equal qualifications within the uncertainties, the candidate from the underrepresented group should be hired.” That all but contradicts NRAO’s original policy: “All appointments and promotions are based on qualifications and performance without regard to race, color, religion, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, marital status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.” 

NRAO scientists were also expected to “champion diversity” initiatives. Annual online training programs required all employees to certify that they had read, understood, and would comply with the NRAO’s Non-Discrimination and Harassment policy. I could not certify that I understood NRAO’s contradictory policies any more than I could certify that I understood 2+2=5. So I sent a confidential memo detailing “Institutional Discrimination by Race and Sex at AUI/NRAO (confidential draft, 2019 Feb 19)” to NRAO Director Tony Beasley, naïvely hoping he would obey NRAO’s HR Policy Manual: “Any reported allegations of discrimination, harassment, or retaliation will be investigated promptly and confidentially.”

Beasley did not even acknowledge receiving my memo, so I pinged him about it. He replied on April 19, 2019, that he had received and read the memo but wrote: “I consider this issue closed, thank you for your efforts to voice your concerns and thoughts.” Legal discovery revealed that just nine minutes later, instead of promptly investigating my allegations of discrimination, he tried to suppress them, telling his heads of Scientific Services, HR, and the Office of Diversity and Inclusion that “we really need this to die down and go away.”

On September 14, 2022, the NRAO announced that “Advance broader, equitable, inclusive participation in science and engineering” had been added to its originally nonpolitical mission statement, with links to a web page advertising several prima facie illegal programs. Most have since been scrubbed, but the “Women in Engineering” fellowship page remains live at the time of this article’s publication. No men need apply.

The NRAO even created new discriminatory criteria. Its program “Exploring the Electromagnetic Spectrum” for “BIPOC and LGBTQIA+” excluded straight white applicants, male and female. I feared that adding DEI to NRAO’s mission statement would further override its standards of merit, so I sent an email to the scistaff listserv opposing discrimination. Included in that email was a copy of a 2016 exchange with the HR head in which I questioned how the Observatory could claim to hire “without regard” to race or sex while simultaneously giving preference to “underrepresented” candidates in hiring decisions:

Quickly, a string of attacks and fabrications ensued.

Within four hours, Beasley emailed his HR and Diversity heads with ideas about how to respond to me. One such idea read, “I am going to suggest to a carefully selected few members of scistaff that they create a petition (outside observatory resources) to state their support for DI, then get every damn member of scistaff to sign it and present to the observatory to show their support. Every. Damn. One.” He also admitted that taking action against me would be “[d]ifficult to not look retaliatory, but maybe that’s the right thing to do.”:

On the following day, September 15, Beasley addressed the listserv saying that I had expressed “negative highly-personal opinions,” disparaged members of the staff, and violated “workplace conduct policies, including creating a hostile environment.”:

It was on the 15th as well that NRAO Director Beasley and AUI President Cohen decided to, despite AUI’s non-retaliation policy, revoke my Emeritus status:

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits employers from retaliating against employees engaged in “protected activities,” such as opposing discrimination. So, my attorney filed a federal civil complaint for retaliation. Don’t try this unless you are determined enough to pay $100,000 out-of-pocket for legal expenses, work several hundred hours to help your legal team prepare your case, and wait three years for results.

AUI argued that my email was not protected activity for several reasons. Some were irrelevant, such as the claim that I was merely a “former employee.” Others were fabricated, including allegations that I had disparaged NRAO staff. And some were plainly pretextual, such as the assertion that sending my email through the listserv constituted an egregious policy violation.

The federal judge disagreed with AUI, writing that “Because Condon has alleged sufficient facts to establish that he engaged in protected activity; that AUI took adverse employment action; and that the two events are causally linked; he has alleged sufficient facts to state a retaliation claim as a former employee under Title VII.”

I hope this result will discourage retaliation against future whistleblowers.