An Auburn University professor and the two deans he accused in a federal lawsuit of helping strip him from his role as graduate program officer of the Economics Department for speaking out on the unusually high number of football players in the school’s public administration program have mutually agreed to dismiss the suit.

U.S. District Judge Corey L. Maze dismissed Professor Alan Seals’ lawsuit against Deans Joseph Aistrup and Jason Hicks on Thursday without prejudice, meaning Seals cannot refile the lawsuit that claimed retaliation and conspiracy to violate Seals’ civil rights.

Seals filed the lawsuit in federal court in Montgomery in June 2019, alleging he was a source on a Wall Street Journal story published in 2015 that reported about half of students majoring in public administration at Auburn played sports, including nearly all the top players on the football team, in 2013. The story quoted an email where an unnamed official wrote that “If the public administration program is eliminated, the [graduation success rate] numbers for our student-athletes will likely decline.”

The professor participated in the story a year after John Urschel, a mathematician and former NFL offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens, conducted an analysis that determined the chances that 23 of 43 upperclassmen football players were public administration majors while only 88 total upperclassmen at the entire university had that major were “about one in three undecillion.”

“For those of you not familiar with your large numbers past trillion, that is a digit 3 followed by thirty-six zeros!” Urschel wrote in a post published in The Players’ Tribune. “Yes, 1 in 3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s roughly equivalent to you flipping a coin and landing on heads 125 times in a row.”

Seals was also a source for an Alabama Gazette story published in November 2015 titled “All the Speaker’s Men and the Collapse of AU Athletics,” according to his suit.

The economics professor, who remains at Auburn, said he also protested the school’s “ongoing actions,” which he said included “the explicit offer of Athletics Department money to fund the troubled [public administration] program and pay professors’ salaries” in late 2015 and early 2016.

The protest included “a picture of then-Provost Timothy Boosinger next to a picture of Joseph Stalin and a photo of Dean Aistrup arm-in-arm with then-Athletic Director Jay Jacobs which first appeared on the Dean’s twitter account.”

Seals claimed he was stripped of his position of graduate program officer of the Economics Department and had his benefits and compensation reduced.

“The Plaintiff’s constitutionally-protected speech regarded matters of public concern made as a private citizen, specifically, abuses in the Athletics Department, as set out in articles participated in or generated by Plaintiff in the Wall Street Journal, Chronicle of Higher Education, the Alabama Gazette, as well as his office door collage,” Seals’ lawsuit stated. “Said speech played a substantial part in Defendants’ decision to discharge the Plaintiff as the Economics Department’s Graduate Program Officer.”

Seals was not the only Auburn University professor to file a lawsuit over the scandal.

Michael Stern, an Auburn economics professor, alleged he was unfairly targeted after he complained about the high concentration of athletes in the school’s public administration program.

An Alabama jury awarded Stern $645,837 in damages in November, finding after a two-week trial that Stern’s former dean illegally punished him for speaking out. The jury did not agree with similar complaints against other university officials named as defendants.

Stern is also still a professor at the university.