Supreme Court could consider UNR case

Saturday, Nov. 29, 1997 | 3:54 a.m.

Lawyers for Yvette Farmer, a white sociology professor who once worked at UNR, intend to ask the U.S. Supreme Court next month to hear her anti-discrimination lawsuit.

The Nevada Supreme Court earlier this year ruled in favor of the university's decision seven years ago to hire a similarly qualified black sociologist over Farmer and to pay higher salaries to minorities to boost ethnic diversity

Mark Gallagher, an attorney for the Pacific Legal Foundation in Sacramento, Calif., said his office will appeal Farmer's case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

"We have the (appeal) petition all ready to go," Gallagher said. "We were really waiting to see what would happen in Piscataway."

Affirmative action proponents and detractors were closely watching a case out of Piscataway, N.J., in which a white teacher was laid off while an equally qualified black teacher was retained at a school that gave employment preferences to ethnic minorities.

That case was expected to be a test of the country's affirmative action policies before a conservative Supreme Court.

However, before justices could rule in the case, black leaders contributed more than $308,000 of a $433,000 settlement to pay the white teacher to drop her lawsuit against the school.

"I would not have guessed this would have become the next test case for affirmative action," Richard Jarvis, chancellor of the University and Community College System of Nevada, said of the UNR case Wednesday.

It could be several months before Supreme Court justices announce whether they will hear the case.

Farmer, 37, was passed over for a teaching job at UNR in 1990, when the university hired Johnson Makoba, a black African who recently had emigrated from Uganda. Farmer was hired the following year and soon learned Makoba, who still works at UNR, was making nearly $11,000 more a year than she was. Makoba could not be reached for comment Friday.

Farmer, who now has a job in the Seattle area, filed suit in 1993 against UNR over the disparity. She won a Washoe County District Court judgment, but that ruling was reversed by the state Supreme Court in January after an appeal by the university system.

Justices voted 3-2 in support of the university's hiring preferences and higher salaries for ethnic minorities.

Jarvis and the university system's chief attorney, Tom Ray, said the sudden national interest in Farmer's case caught them by surprise. They were unfamiliar with many of the case's details but said they plan in the coming weeks to spend more time studying the case.

Ray, who took the university system job in August, said the Farmer appeal could allow the U.S. Supreme Court to decide the fate of affirmative action plans across the country.

"If they want to address whether affirmative action should continue, this probably isn't a bad case to look at," he said.