Ward Connerly's Point Man in Missouri Loses Lawsuit Against College

The Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog
May 7, 2008

It has been a rough week for Timothy P. Asher, executive director of a campaign to get Missouri voters to ban the use of affirmative-action preferences by public colleges and other state and local agencies.
On Sunday, Mr. Asher’s campaign organization missed a deadline for gathering enough signatures to get its measure on the November ballot.
On Tuesday, the Missouri Court of Appeals for the Western District handed him more bad news. It upheld a lower court’s ruling against him in his lawsuit against North Central Missouri College, which he had accused of firing him from his job as admissions director in 2004 because he complained that one of its scholarship programs discriminated against white students.
The lower court had held, in a March 2007 summary judgment against Mr. Asher, that he had not technically been fired from his job because he had been a contract employee. It also rejected his lawsuit’s claim that his termination had been handled in a manner that violated the state’s open-meetings laws. The court also found that the college was shielded from lawsuits like his under the doctrine of sovereign immunity....

Ward Connerly, the prominent affirmative-action critic who is coordinating efforts in several states to get proposed restrictions on affirmative action on the November ballot, has said he will continue his fight in Missouri and try to get a measure on the ballot there in 2010. —Peter Schmidt [To read the entire article, go to: http://chronicle.com/news/article/4448/ward-connerlys-point-man-in-missouri-loses-bias-lawsuit-against-college?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en ]