AMHERST — A University of Massachusetts History Department lecturer is seeking a preliminary injunction in Hampshire Superior Court to keep administrators from filling an assistant professor position, alleging he was denied the promotion over his pro-Palestinian views and false accusations of antisemitism.
UMass officials, though, in their response prior to Wednesday afternoon’s preliminary injunction hearing before Judge David Hodge at the Northampton court, say that Mohammad Ataie’s lawsuit is based mostly on “speculation, conjecture and fundamentally inaccurate information.”
They contend that there were other reasons the original search in spring 2025 to fill the vacancy was halted, including UMass losing $8 million in grant funding and concerns with Ataie’s “significantly substandard” resume reflective of being “an unproductive scholar.” Ataie was the runner-up candidate.
Attorneys for Ataie recently filed the complaint so that the Modern Middle East position would remain vacant “until Dr. Ataie’s rights to be appointed to that position have been determined by this court… such an order is necessary to prevent further harm to Dr. Ataie’s rights to free expression and to preserve the status quo.”
The lawsuit names the university, Provost Fouad Abd-El-Khalick and Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.
In the lawsuit, brought by Newton attorneys Ellen J. Messing of Messing, Rudavsky & Weliky, P.C. and Anne L. Josephson of Kotin, Crabtree & Strong, LLP, Ataie is described as “a beloved faculty member in the History Department and a scholar of the Modern Middle East (who) emerged as a finalist to fill the position after a nationwide search and months of careful vetting. He was next in line to receive an offer when, in the face of destabilizing funding cuts by the federal government, the university placed a pause on hiring that affected the History Department, among others.”
When this hiring pause was lifted and departments were free to move forward with job offers, UMass didn’t name Ataie to the position, instead beginning a new search that is culminating this spring, about a year later.
“This unusual step differed from the university’s treatment of other ‘paused’ departments where hiring was in its final stages,” the lawsuit states. “The new search proceeded with a new search committee, which created unusual criteria through unusual processes to exclude Dr. Ataie.”
Ataie is a U.S. citizen of Iranian descent who has been a member of the UMass non-tenure-track faculty since 2023. Previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Brandeis University in the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.
In December, a press conference at UMass organized by the Western Massachusetts People’s Tribunal had students and others speaking about what they view as repression by the UMass administration, citing a decision to cut the number of classes Ataie is teaching.
The lawsuit states that when a student accused him of antisemitism, that led administrators to change their treatment of him: “With a campus climate hostile to Palestinian rights and explicit threats from the federal government of funding cuts if the University did not conform to its views on ‘antisemitism’ following Israel’s military incursion into Gaza, Dr. Ataie, a prominent voice for Palestinian rights, was not afforded even an initial interview.”
This stands as a violation of Ataie’s rights under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, Article 16 as amended, and under the Massachusetts Civil Rights Act, the attorneys write.
In the UMass response, from Mark A. Johnson, senior litigation counsel for the Office of the General Counsel in Westborough, affidavits are provided by Abd-El-Khalick, Davidson and Professor of History Joel Wolfe, who chaired the search committee for the second job search.
“Dr. Ataie’s free speech retaliation claims have so little basis as to be reckless. Certainly, for purposes of the preliminary injunctive relief that he seeks, Dr. Ataie has no reasonable likelihood of success on the merits, which is the linchpin of the analysis in this context,” Johnson writes.
As to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights letter received by UMass about antisemitism on campus, that had no role in pausing the search: “By way of brief summary, during spring semester 2025, UMass Amherst was responding to an extreme and multifaceted financial crisis, not to one OCR letter about antisemitism.”
“There is simply no evidence that anyone at the university took Dr. Ataie’s political speech into consideration at any time in making the subject employment decisions. In fact, the affidavits of Dean Davidson and Dr. Wolfe explicitly state that politics provided no basis for their decisions. Dr. Ataie’s attempt to force that connection by strained inference and invective has no basis.”
The affidavit from Davidson indicates that there were questions over whether Ataie should have been brought back for full-time employment this academic year, that “there was no clear, critical or rational instructional need.” That was based on the academic year 2024-25, when Ataie taught 101 students out of a budgeted 189 students.
Abd-El-Khalick’s affidavit references how searches are completed: “As with all closed searches in this process and in this context, the closed status was final. That is, to the extent a search for the same position might be approved in the future, that subsequent search would not pick up where the closed search had left off; it would be an entirely new search.”
Finally, the UMass attorneys note the harm that might happen to the institution if an injunction is granted:
“The History department has an accepted offer from the top-ranked candidate, which was the result of a thorough and fair process. An injunction could leave that position vacant for years. Further, it would incentivize similarly situated applicants in any search, unhappy with search results, to consider lawsuits, thereby undermining the university’s ability to make legitimate decisions regarding its operations and finances; to assemble search committees to run searches with meaningful criteria and full and fair assessment of all applicants; and to attract and retain top candidates for positions.”
