A University of Massachusetts History Department lecturer is asking a Hampshire Superior Court judge to stop administrators from filling an assistant professor job until his claim to the post is resolved. Mohammad Ataie says the university denied him the promotion because of his pro-Palestinian views and false accusations of antisemitism, and a hearing on his request for a preliminary injunction was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon before Judge David Hodge in Northampton.
The filing says Ataie, a U.S. citizen of Iranian descent, was a finalist after a nationwide search and months of careful vetting and was next in line for an offer before UMass paused the hiring process. Attorneys for Ataie asked the court to keep the Modern Middle East position vacant “until Dr. Ataie’s rights to be appointed to that position have been determined by this court,” saying that such an order is needed to prevent further harm to his rights to free expression and preserve the status quo.
UMass officials rejected the complaint, saying it rests on “speculation, conjecture and fundamentally inaccurate information.” They said the original search in spring 2025 was halted after the university lost $8 million in grant funding and had concerns about Ataie’s resume, which they described as “significantly substandard” and reflective of “an unproductive scholar.” Ataie was the runner-up candidate in that search.
The dispute has since grown into a fight over how the university handled the vacancy after the pause was lifted. The lawsuit says UMass did not appoint Ataie when hiring resumed and instead launched a new search, which is now culminating in spring 2026, about a year later. It also says the new search committee used unusual criteria and unusual processes to exclude him. The suit names UMass, Provost Fouad Abd-El-Khalick and Maria del Guadalupe Davidson.
Ataie has been a member of the UMass non-tenure-track faculty since 2023 and previously worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Brandeis University’s Crown Center for Middle East Studies. In December, a press conference at UMass organized by the Western Massachusetts People’s Tribunal brought students and others to campus to protest what they described as repression by the administration, including a decision to cut the number of classes Ataie is teaching.
At bottom, the case asks whether UMass can keep moving the Modern Middle East hire forward while Ataie says he was the candidate who should have been chosen first. The court fight now turns on whether the judge believes the hiring pause and the restart were ordinary administrative decisions, or whether they masked retaliation tied to speech the university has already denied punishing.