California Community Colleges System Quietly Disavowed Tyrannical Diversity Dictates After Lawsuit

The cult of diversity is crumbling all over California.

Last month, the University of California announced with much fanfare that it would no longer require diversity statements for faculty hires.

And in a little noticed move, the California Community Colleges system has quietly disavowed its tyrannical diversity dictates following a lawsuit from six professors who said the mandates violated their First Amendment rights.

To defend against the lawsuit, the system said it would not enforce its requirements that professors adhere to DEI concepts in the classroom.  The federal judge hearing the case then concluded that because the dictates were suddenly optional the professors had not been harmed so he dismissed the case early this year.

But the rules did not sound very optional when they were first announced in 2023 for teaching and evaluations. The regulations said that,“Faculty members shall employ teaching, learning, and professional practices that reflect DEIA [diversity equity inclusion and accessibility] and anti-racist principles” and that schools should “place significant emphasis on DEIA competencies in employee evaluation and tenure review.”

The DEIA “competencies” meant following the party line. The competent professor promotes  “and incorporates DEI and anti-racist pedagogy. “ And he or she also “Develops and implements a pedagogy and/or curriculum that promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens.”

The competent professor is also required to articulate “the importance and impact of DEI and anti-racism as part of the institution’s greater mission.”

On top of all this, the California Community College Chancellor’s office had put together a glossary of terms that made any dissent from DEI dogma verboten.  Merit was defined as a ruse that perpetuates “white privilege under the guise of standards.”

The glossary also deemed color blindness, the linchpin of Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement, as offensive and retrograde. It says that color blindness is a “racial ideology” which enforces “racial inequalities and denies systematic racism.”

In August 2023, six Fresno-area community college professors filed a lawsuit over the diversity dictates in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California.

The professors were represented by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.  The defendants included  California Community Colleges Chancellor  Sonya Christian and the California Community Colleges State Board of Governors.

The lawsuit called the DEI rules “an unconstitutional blanket restriction on college faculty’s speech on matters of public concern. ”

It said they amounted to conscripted speech in violation of the First Amendment because “California Community Colleges’ new [DEI] rules force professors to endorse the government’s view on politically charged questions regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.”

The complaints also argued that because the rules hinged evaluations on proper adherence to DEI in the classrooms,  professors could be fired if they dissented. “Plaintiffs risk termination if they fail to embrace the new DEIA Rules. But if Plaintiffs attempt to comply with the DEIA Rules, they will be forced to alter their curriculum and teaching methods, parrot the government’s views, and abandon their academic freedom.”

The professors who filed the lawsuit were described as free thinkers who could not teach as they wished because of the diversity rules. For example, the complaint said that English professor Loren Palsgaard “wants his students to explore topics of public concern from multiple perspectives while observing a code of mutual respect. Palsgaard has concluded that if he discusses controversial issues in DEIA matters or presents competing views on those issues, he will be [per the regulations] deemed insufficiently “anti -racist or accused of Weaponiz[ing] academic freedom” and “inflict[ing] curricular trauma” on his students.”

“Palsgaard used to assign students Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail and Victor Davis Hanson’s Mexifornia. But he will no longer assign these books as a result of the DEIA Rules, because King’s letter includes a racial slur and Both King and Hanson offer perspectives that are different from the “anti-racism” and “intersectionality” perspective mandated by the DEIA Rules. Palsgaard similarly used to assign pieces by William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor but no longer assigns them because their books contain racial slurs.”

But to defend against the lawsuit, the California Community Colleges system, represented by state Attorney General Rob Bonta, filed a motion to dismiss that argued the regulations were merely suggestions and would not conscript speech. “Nothing in the regulations restricts any individual’s speech or compels any person to engage in any particular speech. And the regulations do not include any enforcement mechanism by which any individual can be disciplined by Chancellor Christian or the Board for expressing any particular viewpoint—even a viewpoint that is contrary to the ideals set forth in the regulations.”

The motion also explicitly stated that the professors would not be punished for teaching Letter from Birmingham Jail and other books they argued sounded verboten under the rules.

Based on all those newfound promises, United States District Court for the Eastern District of California Judge Kirk Sherriff declared on January 28 that the rules did not infringe on the professors’ free speech rights. So he tossed the case.

The judge said that neither the DEI rules or the professors’ contracts “mandate what professors teach or how any DEIA principles should be implemented” so there was no “credible threat of enforcement of the provisions against them.”

In a statement, Foundation for Individual Rights attorney Daniel Ortner hailed the case outcome as a huge victory for free speech. “FIRE filed suit to prevent California’s community colleges from evaluating our faculty clients on the basis of their classroom commitment to a political ideology, and that’s exactly the result we’ve achieved. As a result of our suit, the state and the district promised a federal judge they won’t interfere with our clients’ academic freedom and free speech rights. The classroom is for discussion and exploration, not a top-down mandate about what ideas must take priority. We’ll make sure it stays that way.”

Ortner declined to be interviewed.

But former ACLU president Nadine Strossen told the California Globe that, “I completely support this lawsuit and applaud the end of the policy.”

Strossen considers the California rules the flip side of the law that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis enacted which limits what state universities professors can say about race, such as not browbeating students about racism. That provision of the law was ruled unconstitutional in 2022  by a federal district judge. Florida is appealing the ruling.

Strossen said via email that, “Although the California Community College system had views about DEI issues that were diametrically different from the views of Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis on these issues – as reflected in Florida’s controversial “Stop Woke Act” – both the California and Florida regulations on point shared the same fundamental First Amendment flaw: both sought to impose particular viewpoints about important issues, including issues about race and gender, on faculty members and students. As Supreme Court Justices, all across the ideological spectrum, long have affirmed, the “bedrock principle” underlying the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee is “viewpoint neutrality”: that government (including public educational institutions) must remain neutral regarding views and ideas, since it is up to each of us as individuals to make up our own minds about these vital matters. This principle is especially important in the context of schools and universities, where the free flow of ideas and debates is essential for teaching and research. The purpose of educational institutions is to EDUCATE their students, not to INDOCTRINATE them – to teach them HOW to think not WHAT to think.”