Legal expert sees big free speech threats from CA Community College bureaucracy

Depicted: Fresno City College. Image by Wikimedia Commons

Noted author and attorney Greg Lukianoff on Substack explores the ways that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) statements at California colleges function as political litmus tests on campus, creating a very difficult barrier to entry for anyone not in lockstep with the prevailing ideological orthodoxy. He calls it the Conformity Gauntlet.

From a legislative or regulatory standpoint, the single biggest threat I have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus has been the DEI requirements implemented by the California Community Colleges system. In an effort to combat these requirements, FIRE sued the California Community Colleges Chancellor and the members of its Board of Governors, as well as the State Center Community College District.

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In the case, FIRE is representing six tenured professors, each of whom teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching and pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. This includes requiring professors to “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”

Under these regulations, faculty performance and tenure will also be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of these government-mandated viewpoints. As our client, Reedley College professor Bill Blanken, said, “I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”

Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” (which we sued over too — and won. It’s currently on appeal.) was unconstitutional because it attempted to restrain what viewpoints a professor can espouse. The State Center Community College District’s rule, however, is about what viewpoints professors must espouse. It’s an attempt to compel someone to express a belief, which is never lawful. We don’t force people to salute the flag, or display the state motto, or print opinions they don’t like in their newspaper, and we certainly don’t demand they profess faith in any kind of political idea in the course of educating other people.

The only thing scarier than the idea that administrators would attempt to compel speech as a method for forcing people to further their ideology is the idea that any of them would think doing so is okay. And I don’t only mean legally okay. I mean morally okay. Forcing others to mouth your beliefs is never an acceptable way of promulgating an ideology.

This article originally appeared in Substack. Read the whole thing here.

Related:

• SJSU prof: DEI statements enable subjective, narrow-minded, “mini-me” screening

• Why six CA'n community college profs are fighting back against DEI statements

• Educators divided on polarizing Bay Area DEI workshops

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