Below is my column in The Hill on the recent victory of a California professor in challenging diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies on free speech grounds. It is a rare win for dissenting faculty as DEI policies become more expansive and mandatory.
Here is the column:
From academia to corporations to the government, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies have expanded exponentially in the last 10 years. At colleges and universities, administrators now monitor compliance with DEI on every level, from teaching to hiring to promotions.
And there is little subtlety or nuance in these programs. You object to DEI statements, priorities and training at your own peril.
This week, federal magistrate Judge Christopher Baker issued a major 44-page report finding that Bakersfield College in California violated the First Amendment rights of Professor Daymon Johnson with its DEI mandates for faculty. If upheld, the report could be the foundation for a major free speech ruling.
The Johnson case is important because it challenges the claim of universities that DEI policies are simply guidelines and suggested practices. At the same time, universities have massively increased DEI offices and incorporated reviews in every aspect of academic life. The problem is that many DEI policies raise political, religious and academic values that some academics do not support. This can range from pronoun requirements to required perspectives taught in classrooms.
Johnson is one such dissenter. The history professor found himself the subject of a five-month investigation by the college after he criticized a 2019 Facebook post of English Professor Andrew Bond in which Bond called the United States a “piece of s**t nation.” Bond had added, “Go ahead and quote me, conservatives. This country has yet to live up to the ideals of its founding documents.”
Johnson did quote him, with the caption: “Do you agree with this radical [social justice warrior] from BC’s English Department? Thoughts?” A commentator on Facebook later added “Maybe he should move to China, and post this about the PRC in general or the Chinese Communist Party and see how much mileage it gets him. I wonder, do they still send the family the bill for the spent round?’”
Bond responded in September 2021 by filing an administrative complaint against Johnson for harassment and bullying. Although Johnson was eventually cleared, the college issued a clear warning to him that it would “investigate any further complaints of harassment and bullying and, if applicable, [taking] appropriate remedial action including but not limited to any discipline determined to be appropriate.”
Johnson said that he has experienced retaliation and harassment due to his opposition to DEI policies. Judge Baker’s review of Bakersfield’s policies found that they are clearly mandates, not suggestions. He found that the college used mandatory “shalls” to state the expectations of faculty, including “teaching, learning, and professional practices that reflect DEIA and anti-racist principles, and in particular, respect for, and acknowledgement of the diverse backgrounds of students and colleagues to improve equitable student outcomes and course completion.”
Bakersfield also requires that faculty “promote and incorporate culturally affirming DEIA and anti-racist principles to nurture and create a respectful, inclusive, and equitable learning and work environment.” Judge Johnson found that the claim of the college that these are merely “aspirational goals” is “disingenuous.”
This is not the first such free speech controversy for Bakersfield College. Another Bakersfield College history professor, Matthew Garrett, was previously fired for speaking out against social justice programs. He and other professors are now suing.
After that controversy, John Corkins, vice president of the Board of Trustees of the Kern Community College District Board (which oversees the college), declared, “We have to continue to cull” problem faculty. He added: “Got them in my livestock operation and that’s why we put a rope on some of them and take them to the slaughterhouse. That’s a fact of life with human nature and so forth, I don’t know how to say it any clearer.” He later apologized.
Law schools are also facing controversial mandates. In 2022, the American Bar Association required law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism: (1) at the start of the program of legal education, and (2) at least once again before graduation.” Many schools are now requiring faculty to annually confirm DEI or diversity components in teaching.
I have long incorporated race issues in my classes. I also teach critical race theory, alongside other (including opposing) legal theories to my first-year torts students. I do so because I want them to be familiar with these issues and theories in forming their own views and values. However, the increasing mandates raise serious questions about the free speech and academic freedom of faculty who do not share those views.
Often, schools will find alternative grounds for harassing or firing dissenting faculty. Those efforts received a boost recently from the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which rejected the free speech claims of North Carolina State University Professor Stephen Porter. The statistics professor had objected to what he considered the lower standards used by his school to hire minority faculty. When he sued over retaliation for his views expressed both publicly and to the faculty, the Fourth Circuit ruled that the school could discipline him for a lack of “collegiality.”
“Collegiality” was long used as an excuse to block promotion or hiring of women, minority and leftist faculty. The decision in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University is pending before the Supreme Court for possible review. If allowed to stand, it would offer universities a ready-made excuse for cracking down on the dwindling number of dissenters.
For faculty, what are presented as suggestions are often treated as mandatory. Take the “indigenous land acknowledgment” created for faculty at the University of Washington. The school told professors that they could add such a statement to their course material to honor “all tribes and bands within the Suquamish, Tulalip and Muckleshoot nations.” Computer science Professor Stuart Reges disagreed with the factual and philosophical basis of the statement, so he posted a land acknowledgment stating that under “the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.”
He was told to remove his optional statement. The request was no longer optional. Dean Magdalena Balazinska explained that “[t]he statement Stuart Reges included in his syllabus was inappropriate, offensive and not relevant to the content of the course he teaches.”
However, the university’s land acknowledgment was somehow deemed entirely relevant and appropriate.
Bakersfield College continues to distinguish itself in these anti-free speech efforts. The school may call itself “The Renegades,” but it has shown a lack of tolerance for any rebellious or dissenting faculty. We may value renegades as mascots, but we increasingly abhor them as colleagues.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
When people are an obstacle to your rights and freedoms, you should be able to mow them down with a machine gun…but with due process, of course.
While you may require a machine gun to mow them down, some of us only need a single shot from a bolt rifle to put you down.
Dear Prof Turley,
Are you a history teacher? History is replete with DEI. Refer to it. .. history, I mean.
What’s that got to do with the dictator’s price of beans in China and the unhinged psychopaths running the U.S. government? VP Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s DEI .. . and you don’t see her complaining.
It is ‘sad when governments are cheaped by the Devil tongue’.
*in other news, a biological female won the Miss Universe prize over two biological males .. . but they were all winners.
The antonym of Diversity is University.
Let’s get down to it…, what generates curriculum in Amercan education is textbook market share. While DEI has become a talking point hobby horse for the right, and it’s spurred much magat knashing of teeth, what is really shown is that there is pressure to go beyond the mentality determining curriculum that is locked down by whether or not a text book can sell in Texas and California. The right has engaged in what will prove to be a futile effort at censorship with its book banning efforts.
The only way to end the tyranny of DEI and other such woke nonsense is to push back aggressively and allow the SCOTUS to eventually rule of these and other constitutional infringements such as all hate-speech legislation. The right has allowed this to slide far too long and now it will be an uphill slog to remove all this pernicious infringement on the free people of this nation. Time to clean house and rid ourselves of these various cultural diseases.
There is no hate speech legislation in this country. There’s no doubt that the Democrat Party would like to enact some, but thankfully the courts are vigilant and they know it will be struck down so they don’t even try.
Bear in mind that Kern is likely the most conservative county in California, and it really is, they refer to it as ‘the Texas of California’. Pervasive is an understatement, and this all happened without any of our consent or an invitation to participate. By the same token, people were so asleep at the wheel they failed to see the initial stirrings, or if they did, they couldn’t be bothered to care.
People in the likes of actual Texas that think some invisible shield will protect them need to think again. Pass all the laws you like, the Marxists will find ways around them and they will never relent; eventually the generational indoctrination will be pretty near irreversible, as in China. We may be 50/50 politically, but regarding real education, the ultimate solution to it all, we are near 100% in deficiency. Defund, and stop sending your kids.
And you never thought that DEI would be used as a tool by incompetents to promote incompetents and attack opponents? Silly you.
Diversity [dogma] is color judgment or class bigotry, including: racism, sexism, ageism, etc. practiced under the Pro-Choice ethical religion and DIE (Diversity, Indoctrination. Exclusion).
That said, diversity of individuals, minority of one. #HateLovesAbortion
Someday in the future these young people will wake up and realize they are working for foreigners who were not born here. These foreigners will come from a culture that has more discipline and will have gone through an education system that sticks to the subject matter and doesn’t deviate to include any of this equity or inclusivity BS. This is the most powerful country in the world. We have the most powerful military in the world. We have the world’s biggest economy. No army can attack us and occupy us. Our biggest problem is ourselves.
I see that DEI has done a great job in stopping an explosion in anti-Semitism on US campuses…NOT. Irony of irony is many of those liberals who have been advocating DEI are now the victims of the explosion of campus anti-Semitism. So sad. So frightening.
Bakersfield also requires that faculty “promote and incorporate culturally affirming DEIA and anti-racist principles to nurture and create a respectful, inclusive, and equitable learning and work environment.”
Except for the Joos. . . for them its “from the river to the sea”, treatment. (ie, extermination)
I just cant fathom how so many people with doctorates, can’t together gather enough ability to use logic the BELIEVE the lies they tell themselves, while threatening all those that expose their idiocy.
What employer would want to hire a graduate from these DEI colleges and expect excellence?
I would not!
I have no doubt that the DNC will be flying in teams of lawyers shortly to appeal Judge Christopher Baker’s decision (if they haven’t already). They can’t afford to have anyone, especially a federal judge, stray from the communist party line.
There are more and more policies being passed and implemented, the sum total of which, serve to restrict, roll back or contradict, Constitutional guaranteed rights.
Да, товарищ комиссар! (Yes, Comrade Commissar!)
Is not DEI simply rebranding of Marxism? Change a few words here and there, slap on some lipstick and presto!! You have DEI and the DEI officers now replace the Soviet Comrade Commissar. The Marxist views everything through the lens of “Oppressed” and Oppressor.” They are incapable of any original thoughts.
“Second verse, same as the first.” Those who push communism are usually living the good life. While those who mindlessly follow do their bidding. Without engaging their brains. They would be first in the Kool-Aid line.
Cults and cult leaders often use euphemisms to describe what they do. What is a community organizer? Answer, a Marxist who divides people up into simplistic categories such as oppressed and oppressors.
E.M. That was an absolutely great post.
Agree.
Not related to this specific case but to the larger issue of First Amendment Freedom of Speech: This morning the DC Court of Appeals is hearing Trump’s Appeal of the Gag Order imposed upon him by Judge Chutkan:
Order for hearing: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67891889/1208568105/united-states-v-donald-trump/
Trump Reply Brief (filed on Friday) summarizing the issues and arguments that the appellate court will be entertaining, scheduled to begin at 9::30am eastern time:
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67891889/1208572136/united-states-v-donald-trump/
Thanks for posting the Reply Brief, which appears to be well done. If Trump loses he will no doubt appeal to SCOTUS.
No sweat. I think the Reply Brief is superb, although most publications — including The Messenger, where Turley is a regular contributor — don’t give the appeal much of a chance. But then, all of those jounalistic opinions were written BEFORE Trump’s final Reply Brief was submitted.
It will be an interesting test in a district that is generally hostile to Trump.
“The mind is a terrible thing to waste.” We’re so accustomed in 2023 America to censorship and wrongspeak and other totalitarian tactics to actually stop people from speaking at all that we forget that the university was always supposed to be a kind of petrie dish of thought. Academia should be the last bastion of free thought and free speech and instead it was and is the first to cave. To people who have never had a “real job” outside academia, the fear of not getting tenure is sufficient to induce them to embrace the most abject forms of intellectual self-abasement. The end result of all of this will be a renaissance in academia, as the old ridiculous systems and structures implode and stronger ones take their place. The future is bright. The present is messy, but necessary.
and that will mean NOTHING to fascist Democrats
I went to a parent’s weekend at a top small college…where the President said at the Parent weekend…given the Supreme courts ruling on race based admission they would JUST use the written portion of the application and if you mention you are black…that would GREATLY increase your chance of getting in…as BLACKS extremely rarely can attain admissions just on academics. So OPENLY going AGAINST what the Court Ruling
Time to end all Federal Aid and Loan Guarantees to colleges….let democrats fund their FAILURE!
I surely hope you re-evaluated paying for your child to be brainwashed at this school.
I surely hope you reported this to one or more of the public interest organizations that sue over such policies, so they can find an appropriate plaintiff and take legal action.
I’m not even going to touch this subject matter.
And I am sure that most other people want nothing to do with it as well.
DEI is the hypocrisy that’s d̸e̸s̸t̸r̸o̸y̸i̸n̸g̸ destroyed this Country.
By its implementation, it DIES!