Justices Will Rule on Arab’s Charge of Bias

The Supreme Court today agreed to consider blocking a civil rights lawsuit by an Arab who says he was denied tenure on a college faculty because of racial discrimination.

The court said it will review a ruling that reinstated a lawsuit against St. Francis College of Loretto, Pa., and the college’s tenure committee.

Majid Ghaidan Khazraji, a U.S. citizen born in Iraq, had been an associate professor at St. Francis for more than five years when he was denied tenure in 1978.

He sued the college for discrimination under the Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1964. He said the college improperly considered his ethnic background as an Arab and his religion, Muslim.

A federal judge dismissed the suit, but the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it last March based on the 1866 law.

The appeals court said Arabs may be considered a protected minority under the Reconstruction-era law even though the statute was aimed primarily at guaranteeing the rights of blacks.

The appeals court acknowledged that the race of Arabs is Caucasian but added, “When Congress referred in the statute to ‘race’ it plainly did not intend thereby to refer courts to any particular scientific conception of the term.”

The law is intended to apply to members of any group that is “ethnically and physiognomically distinctive,” the appeals court said.

It ordered further hearings.