A federal judge has rejected a race and age discrimination suit by an applicant of Pakistani ancestry who wasn’t offered an interview for a faculty position at Waukesha County Technical College in Pewaukee, Wisconsin.
U.S. District Judge James Peterson agreed with the college that Iftikhar Memon lacked some of the qualifications required by the job posting for a position teaching economics.
According to the decision, Memon, who was born in 1968, has master’s degrees in education and agricultural economics and had been a lecturer at a university in Pakistan from 1994 to 1996. When he unsuccessfully applied in three rounds of postings for the position in 2012 and 2013, he was teaching grades 4-12 at a local school.
The college didn’t select him for an interview in any of the three hiring rounds. He then filed a Title VII and Age Discrimination in Employment suit.
In the litigation, he asserted that other applicants of Asian descent also were discriminated against during the selection process. He also presented data showing that, as of September 2013, Asians accounted for only one of the college’s 225 instructors who had at least a half-time appointment and only eight of the 705 instructors with less than half-time positions.
