James Moore, professor emeritus of industrial and systems engineering, civil engineering, and public policy and management, drafted a complaint against the Academic Senate alleging viewpoint discrimination in faculty governance at USC, which he circulated to the Senate on Sept 17. 

Moore retired from USC in 2022 and stood for election in the Senate as an at-large member in Spring 2025. 

Moore identifies as a libertarian with conservative leanings. According to his draft complaint, the USC faculty as a body and Academic Senate Executive Boards are mostly politically progressive, which he alleges resulted in him facing viewpoint discrimination when he was denied eligibility to serve on the Academic Senate.

The draft complaint requests that the Department of Education investigate the Academic Senate’s adoption of bylaw 11.1 — which prohibits resigned or retired faculty from being eligible to run or serve as an officer or executive board member — determine if USC’s exclusion of retired faculty violates free inquiry protections and require USC to honor the Spring 2025 election and seat him as an executive board member.

It also asks the department to take any other action necessary to ensure compliance with federal requirements prohibiting free inquiry and viewpoint discrimination.  

The complication began in March, when the Academic Senate amended its bylaws to include bylaw 11.1. Moore ran for election in April and won enough votes to serve on the executive board, but was declared ineligible to serve due to bylaw 11.1. 

In May, Moore said that he allegedly informed the executive board of a contradiction between the Senate’s constitution and bylaw 11.1. He also said that when a contradiction occurs between standing rules and bylaws, the higher order document — in this case the constitution — rules over. 

In Moore’s complaint, he highlighted sections of the constitution reading that all Faculty Assembly members are eligible to participate in the Academic Senate, and that retired faculty are included. But the new bylaw states that retired faculty are not able to serve as officers or Executive Board members. 

“That’s unambiguous. It’s black and white. The bylaws contradict that. Bylaw 11.1 says the retired faculty may not perform in this capacity,” Moore said. 

Moore said that the dissonance between the constitution and the bylaws is an “understandable” error. However, he believes the Academic Senate’s resistance to addressing the error is political. 

John Matsusaka, the Senate’s academic vice president, said that he was unaware of the existence of a contradiction between the bylaws and the constitution. He said that Moore’s ineligibility was not due to viewpoint discrimination. 

“If he’s saying that the bylaws are somehow viewpoint-discriminating, I don’t understand; the bylaws say retired faculty may not serve,” said Matsusaka, a professor in the Marshall School of Business. “That has nothing to do with viewpoint, as far as I can see.”

Moore said that one of the reasons he has pursued serving on the Academic Senate is because he believes in the importance of retired faculty serving as executive board members, since many administrators use their positions on the executive board as an economic stepping stone.

“If you can become an administrator, you can increase your salary, so any self-interested person should be trying to do that, and some people focus on service on the executive committee with that as their primary objective, rather than protecting the interests of the institution by protecting the faculty,” Moore said. 

Moore said his conservative political values are responsible for the issues, accusing the Academic Senate’s executive board of being “politically progressive.”

“The reason that the executive board will not acknowledge the errors that it made and correct its missteps is because they really do not want me serving in that capacity,” Moore said. “So I believe that what is motivating them is viewpoint discrimination, because I’ve experienced it here before.”

Matsusaka said the decision to make retired faculty ineligible came about around August 2024, since he said the board did not want retired faculty to be eligible for serving and wanted to close the gap on that language.  

“The viewpoint discrimination point is hard to see. What’s going on here is the faculty felt that retired faculty should not serve as officers, and I think it was a very one-sided vote. And so they amended the rules processes to make those faculty ineligible,” Matsusaka said.

In 2019, Moore filed a similar complaint against Stanford University, since he is a Stanford alum, which claimed that Stanford was practicing bias against men, specifically through women-only programs, which he compared to businesses posting “whites only” signs.  

Moore also said that this is not the first time he has faced backlash on the basis of his conservative values. In 2018, Moore commented on Associate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination hearings in an email to Price students. His remarks, which included the statement “accusers sometimes lie,” led to Price students holding a protest to call for his removal.  

In 2020, Moore was once again embroiled in controversy when he put up a “blue lives matter” flag on his office door during the George Floyd protests. 

“I’ve been at USC a long time. I’ve been out of the conservative closet for a long time,” Moore said. “I’ve got a lot of conservative friends on the faculty. They’re all in the closet because it is not to your professional advantage to be a conservative faculty member on this campus.” 

Moore also recently submitted a petition to the American Association of University Professors Committee on College and University Governance. According to Moore, the AAUP declined to act on the grounds of the issue being out of their jurisdiction. Moore is currently working on the petition to the DOE, since there is a 180-day deadline after an offense occurs to file.