Muslim University of Wisconsin Professor Gets Tenure Bias Trial

A jury must decide if the University of Wisconsin denied a biology professor at its school of medicine in Madison tenure because he’s Egyptian, Arab, and Muslim, a federal judge ruled.

The university says shortcomings in Ahmed Mahmoud’s research, teaching, and service caused his application to fall short, but a trial could show that explanation was a pretext for race, national origin, and religious bias, the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin said Thursday. The court also cited departures by a department executive committee from its usual tenure review practices.

The committee, in a first, “chose not ...