On September 11, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana immediately rejected an appeal filed over the dismissed case Rushing v. Yeargain (2025). Steven J. Rushing was a tenured professor at Southeastern Louisiana University (SLU) when he alleged the university’s leadership, in 2018, abruptly informed their faculty and staff that external operational compensation (for “additional work activities outside of their responsibilities at the university”) that had been promised had been cancelled due to a “budgetary crisis”. Rushing countered SLU’s claims by conducting his own forensic account that reached the conflicting conclusion the university had manipulated its balance sheets to hide institutional theft as part of its systemic corporate fraud and fiscal malfeasance led by SLU’s President John Crain and his internal auditor.
Rushing alleged that after he submitted his report, he was gagged from raising these concerns to the Faculty Senate Executive Council. And as he continued attempting to appeal to make a public statement about misappropriations the university terminated his employment, despite his tenured status. They cloaked this retaliatory dismissal as being aimed at decorum enforcement, and restructuring to meet the budgetary crisis. He first received a notice of intended termination on January 3, 2019, after first voicing concerns that September 2018.
SLU’s reasons for the termination included his refusal to “complete a workplace fitness evaluation”: this is irrelevant and petty. It also accuses him of asking students to support his claims at the Faculty Senate Meeting: this is in violation of students’ and his own speech rights (as Rushing’s initial claim alleged). SLU also nitpicks by finding faults in innocuous details, such as labeling Rushing’s email as “threatening behavior” when it merely stated: “I am afraid for you to meet with me”. And it penalizes him for “being behind schedule for Music 438”, when this tardiness might have resulted in needing to explain concepts more closely, or due to being distracted by being under fire by the administration. As Rushing’s filing explained these were not suitable reasons for the university to have proven “a breach of contract”. Such nitpicking and fabricated accusations are common in academia. Administrators have been systematically draining funds into their own coffers while shrinking faculty pay and finding any excuses to terminate tenured faculty to instead hire adjuncts at ever-decreasing salaries. The shrinking of the percentage of faculty in America who are tenured has not been an accidental shift, but rather a deliberate campaign to shift power and money in academia from the researchers who students attend to learn from to the administrators raising their tuitions.
Instead of winning on the facts, SLU won on minor abnormalities in the filings, such as that the university had “sovereign immunity”, the plaintiff’s inability to prove the Board violated specific “rules”, and Rushing had failed to name the Board (the entity that decided on his firing) in his lawsuit. The American legal system is thus running on gotchya: defending lawyers of corporations and judges claim that jurisdictional or filing mistakes made at the first filing are sufficient to dismiss a case, and that a litigant cannot refile the same case with these issues fixed because a dismissal has already been issued. Instead of logically fixing glitches and then judging a case on its merits, highly paid lawyers win by finding reasons the judge can ignore allegations by dismissing instead merely for misfiling. This single case might seem inconsequential, as it is unclear why the public should care about a professor’s external funding. But when thousands of similar cases never go to court, or are similarly quashed, the public suffers by the best professors being pressured out, as tuition goes up and money is misappropriated without even self-auditing. After this professor was fired, surely no other professors attempted to similarly complain of misappropriation at the next Senate meeting. This appeal failed without the judge asking for “oral argument”, or even a “reply” to be filed by the defendants. The mistake the appeal hoped to correct was that the initial judgement nitpicked on procedure, which the filer had now corrected. But because the filer had not found new evidence, nor could prove the initial judgement was nitpicking illegally, they lost yet again. This nitpicking needs to be stopped, and rationality should prevail for America’s legal system to once again represent the interests of the people over whoever can pay for a lawyer who can find a typo sufficient to refrain from even hearing arguments that allege corruption and fraud.
