Tenured Professor Sues College for Anti-White Discrimination

A tenured professor at a Historically Black College in Maryland has sued the school for anti-white discrimination. Professor Donna Satterlee alleges she was treated unfairly and denied a promotion by black administrators.

Donna Satterlee, a tenured assistant professor of human ecology and child development who had worked at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore for more than 20 years, filed a lawsuit against the school in July after being terminated last year…

Satterlee says that the university president, Heidi Anderson, “has expressed a preference for African-Americans in hiring of faculty and staff and the upper-administration of the university exhibits a marked bias against Caucasian and Asian citizens.”

Satterlee started working at UMES in 2002 and was awarded tenure in 2019. In 2014 a Kenyan woman named Grace Namwamba was appointed as chair of the department. She reported to the school’s president, Heidi Anderson. The lawsuit claims that Anderson ran a “two-tiered system” which “exploits White and Asian faculty’s work and transfers credit and income generated from that work to selected Blacks in the form of inflated pay and bribes.”

According to the complaint, Grace Namwamba “exhibited a discriminator preference for Black faculty by giving them higher pay and less work.” In practice this meant giving Satterlee lots of last minute assignments. In one case, Namwamba asked Satterlee to come up with a plan for a new master’s program in just two days. Satterlee says this is normally a project that a team of faculty would spend up to a year to complete. Satterlee says she came up with something by the deadline at which point Namwamba “took her work product and stole the credit.”

At some point in 2019, Namwamba also informed Satterlee that she (Satterlee) was the lowest paid professor on the staff, despite the fact that she had better credentials that other staff. Satterlee complained about this pay discrimination and claims that Namwamba responded by failing to sign documents she needed to apply for a full professorship.

When Satterlee eventually raised her concerns to president Anderson, the response from the president was “When are you scheduled to retire?”

In 2024, Satterlee applied for a promotion to full professor. Here application was scored on a point system. A score of 70 was needed to be considered worthy of the promotion. She scored an 82.2. Despite this, Namwamba allegedly started a campaign to deny her the promotion.

Eventually, her promotion was denied. She was the only person denied in that round of promotions. Members of HR then allegedly started a “sham investigation” into allegations that Satterlee was bullying her boss (Namwamba). After “manufacturing absolute lies and violating all norms of due process” they produced a final report with an adverse conclusion.

She says the administrators then threated her with firing to pressure her to resign. But she also notes that Namwamba had sent an email titled “Dr. Santerlee’s Termination recommendation” months before the investigation into her conduct had even started.

In a written statement to Campus Reform, Satterlee said, “If at all UMES wanted to terminate me, they were mandated to follow [University System of Maryland] policy on tenure which would have required due process. They did not follow due process and illegally terminated my tenured position. It is an act of sheer evil. They did not follow due process because they simply had no lawful grounds and believed they were above the law.”…

Satterlee is seeking reinstatement as a full professor at the school, punitive damages, an order for the defendants to “carry out policies, practices, and programs which provide equal employment opportunities for all employees, regardless of race and sex,” among other remedies.

Last month, Satterlee also filed a complaint that the school’s president was guilty of plagiarism.

The president of the University of Maryland Eastern Shore has been accused of plagiarizing portions of her doctoral dissertation in a complaint to the university system.

Heidi Anderson is accused of lifting seven paragraphs of her 400-page dissertation nearly verbatim from a previously published scholarly article. An additional three paragraphs in the 1986 dissertation included in-text citations but no quotation marks. The complaint was filed by a former UMES professor who is also alleging reverse discrimination in a lawsuit against the university…

Donna Satterlee, who was an associate professor of human ecology at UMES from 2002 through 2024, filed the complaint against Anderson to the university system’s Office of Internal Audit through its fraud reporting hotline last month.

There’s no telling how long all of this will drag on. We’ll have to wait and see if there is any justice to be had in Maryland’s courts.

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