The University of North Texas settled a lawsuit brought against the university by a music theory professor who says he suffered professional and emotional damage following accusations of racism that were made in 2020.
The settlement ends a five-year conflict that gained national attention and brought criticism to both UNT for violating a tenured professor’s academic freedom and music theory professor Timothy Jackson for controversial statements about racial barriers in classical music.
UNT will pay $725,000 to Jackson, who drew ire from his peers on the faculty of the College of Music and from the broader music theory community after complaints arose that a publication Jackson edited unfairly criticized the scholarship of a Black music theorist. Graduate students seeking degrees in the College of Music, many of them in the Division of Music History, Theory and Ethnomusicology, circulated a petition pressing the university to investigate the Journal of Schenkerian Studies and potentially fire Jackson, who is tenured.
“I wanted to continue my work at the university, and for the university,” Jackson said. “And I wanted to go forward with the journal and encourage Schenkerian studies. So on that I’m infinitely grateful to my lawyers and my supporters who were steadfast with me for over five years.”
The Denton Record-Chronicle contacted UNT for a comment but didn’t receive a response by Friday morning.
The trouble started when Jackson, who was the founding editor of the journal, invited music theorists with expertise in Schenkerian theory to write rebuttals to a plenary talk by music theorist Philip Ewell, who is Black, given at a Society for Music Theory conference in 2019.
The rebuttals were published in Volume 12 of the journal in 2020, in a section titled “Symposium on Philip Ewell’s SMT Plenary Paper ‘Music Theory’s White Racial Frame.’” The rebuttals included one from Jackson, a leading Schenkerian theory scholar, which attributed the paucity of Black music theorists to musical tastes that largely don’t include classical music. Jackson’s critics, including the executive board of the Society for Music Theory, said the symposium and Jackson had expressed racist sentiments.
Ewell, a professor of music theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York, presented his paper, which criticized famed German music theorist Heinrich Schenker — whose life and career bridged the 19th and 20th centuries — saying Schenker’s unsavory personal and political attitudes reinforce “a white racial frame” of music theory.
Ewell, who later wrote the book On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone in 2023, said the white racial frame of the discipline disadvantages music theory students in general and Black, Indigenous and students of color specifically.
In an interview with the Record-Chronicle in 2020, Ewell called the symposium dehumanizing. The conflict over the symposium, and Jackson’s unpopular assertions in it, happened about two months after George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, when public institutions and corporations were wrestling publicly with issues of race in America.
Jackson said he is somewhat torn by accepting the settlement.
“On the other hand, I would have liked to go into trial,” he said. “Part of me wanted to go to trial, I have to say. Part of me and wanted to have everything exposed publicly, more obviously. I wanted to send a stronger message not just to UNT, but to the whole university system in the United States.”
Jackson has said in previous interviews that his career suffered after the accusations of racism. Throughout the case, Jackson has maintained that the university’s investigation of the edition played a role in his professional isolation and five years of scholarship that weren’t published in the journal, through the center. The case drew public criticism from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression for violating long-protected academic freedom and freedom of speech in American academia.
“It was better to go for the settlement than to really pursue a devastating blow, let’s put it like that — if that were possible,” Jackson said.
The controversy also caused the surviving family members of German composer Reinhold Oppel to lose faith in Jackson, he said. In 2000, Jackson brought the Oppel Memorial Collection to the UNT College of Music. Oppel was a close friend of Schenker, and his music and personal papers were buried under a garden house lawn in a chest in East Germany during World War II. The collection was rescued by Oppel’s son, Kurt, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bringing Oppel’s prize to UNT came with a condition: the formation of the Center for Schenkerian Studies and the creation of the journal.
Jackson’s attorney confirmed that $400,000 of the settlement would go to Jackson, with the remaining $325,000 paying the initial legal fees in the case. Allen Harris Law represented Jackson pro bono, as did Jonathan Mitchell, of Mitchell Law and Texas’ former solicitor general.
“Of course, as the attorney on the case, I’m overjoyed,” lawyer Michael Thad Allen said. “I think this is an unqualified positive outcome.”
Allen said Jackson’s legal representation made multiple offers of nonmonetary resolution.
“In other words, that they would just get the journal back in print and, in the beginning, retract the defamatory statements made about Timothy Jackson, that he had committed racist actions ... but we proposed a nonmonetary resolution, you know, provided that we be able to submit a petition to the court to get our fees paid,” Allen said. “And not only did we not get it rejected, we got no response whatsoever.”
The settlement includes a number of agreements in addition to the monetary damages. It allows Jackson to resume editing and publishing the Journal of Schenkerian Studies. Jackson will be permitted to return to his role as the editor of the publication and will appoint a co-editor approved by the journal’s editorial board in the third year. That co-editor will serve as the editor of the journal for a five-year term after Jackson completes his five-year term. UNT will let Jackson drop one course from his schedule during his work as an editor, which was the practice before the investigation ceased publishing the journal.
As a part of the settlement, Jackson will drop his First Amendment claim against the university and defamation claims against faculty members and a student. UNT is not admitting guilt, according to the settlement.
Allen said he is pleased that the settlement will allow Jackson to publish the journal according to the same editorial review standards as all academic journals published or distributed by the UNT Press. This means that peer review isn’t a condition of all publication. While the journal is publicly labeled as ”a peer-reviewed journal published annually by the center,” Jackson and the journal were criticized for publishing without peer review. There are other journals produced within the music theory division that are also published without peer review.
Jackson said his scholarship and teaching theory is rooted in dialectics.
“I think that the most important thing for universities to teach is not what to think, but how to think. ... Part of that process is what I call dialectics, which goes back to the Greeks. To Plato, to dialogues,” Jackson said. “And I called the symposium in the journal a symposium precisely for that reason, because we published both pro- and anti-Ewell statements. And we wanted to leave it to the readers to decide what they felt was valid criticism and what they didn’t agree with. In other words, it was a dialectical exercise. And a both-sides type of exercise, if you will.”
Jackson said the settlement is a win, but a loss, too. He said universities are censoring faculty and discouraging rigor that develops when students and professors debate, disagree and challenge assumptions or question authority. He said he views his ordeal as evidence of administrative overreach and academic fraud, which happens when scholars stay quiet for fear of reprisal and recrimination.
He chose to stay at UNT — he wasn’t fired or placed on leave — because of his promise to the Oppel family.
“My goal has been to restore everything and make it even better, so they don’t feel badly about having donated these priceless papers and books to the university,” Jackson said. “When I reported what had happened to Kurt, he was devastated. Absolutely devastated.”
The Oppels were wounded to learn that Schenker and his present-day followers were being deemed Nazi sympathizers.
“I feel like, because the papers are at the university ... we need to restore the good name of the journal, and I can’t turn tail and run away,” Jackson said.