Cancel Culture at Cal Lutheran?

A number of high-dollar donors to California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks are demanding to know where their money went – and if it didn’t go where it was supposed to go, they want it back.

At the heart of the issue is the Elton and Janice Gallegly Center for Public Service and Civic Engagement, founded about a decade ago when the former congressman came to an agreement with CLU to store his political archives at the school.

Beyond maintaining the archives, the Center was supposed to be a non-partisan space to discuss public service, fund fellowships, build a replica of Gallegly’s congressional office (attached to the main library,) and host a speakers series amongst other activities.  The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library/Foundation in Simi Valley even lent its name to the fellowship program, a feather in the cap for the Center and CLU.

Note – CLU approached Gallegly with the idea, not vice-versa.

In 2017, the CLU Board of Regents codified a 2013 agreement by passing a resolution outlining what the Center would do and how it operated.  However, it seems that since the accession of Lori Varlotta to the CLU presidency in 2020, the dictates of the resolution have not been followed and the Center has essentially ceased functioning.

The replica of the office was even removed, directly contradicting the terms of the agreement between CLU and the Center:

Shortly after Varlotta entered office, the Republican 13-term former congressman filed suit against CLU alleging the university has failed to live up to its end of the agreement.  Last November, the Reagan library pulled its name from the fellowships which supported students getting their master’s degree in public policy (CLU maintains the fellowships still exist.)

As the Gallegly suit wended its way through court, many of the donors (total amount closing in on about $800,000 reportedly) who made the Center possible began to get more and more frustrated by the actions of CLU and by the silence of the Regents about the conflict.

Last week, attorney Barry Groveman, on behalf of 17 of the donors (some former Regents themselves), sent a voluminous demand letter to CLU, copied (in great detail – binders and binders of information were involved) to the Board of Regents. The demand alleges the Center has been “wrongfully” cancelled and accuses CLU “breach of agreement” and “misrepresentations.”

The letter is not directly part of Gallegly’s lawsuit, but can be said to be a parallel effort to force CLU to at the very least explain their actions and to account for the donated funds – the archiving has, reportedly, yet to be completed, the office was removed, and the speakers series has hosted one person.

Groveman said CLU has not – probably cannot – produce a record of a Regent’s board action subsequent to the 2017 agreement that would void CLU’s continuing support of the Center.

An alleged key to CLU’s decision to apparently distance itself from the Center is politics – actually, exactly the kind of woke campus politics that has been making headlines across the country.

Groveman points to the transcript of a faculty/administrator “Race and Equity” workshop Zoom meeting in 2020, a few months before Varlotta – who has her doctorate’s in “educational leadership and feminist philosophy” –   formally took over as president.

On the call, a number of participants specifically skewered the Center is very direct, very woke language:  “Burn it down to the ground and start over,” “Occupy Gallegly,” “the Gallegly Center needs to be repurposed,” and “Renaming and repurposing that space to be a true center for diversity and inclusion would send a clear message” were amongst the comments.

In a follow-up letter to the administration – which the “next president better be reading” – the Center was described as a “racist space” and that Gallegly himself was anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQIA+.

As Gallegly’s voting record in Congress not even remotely shows those allegations as having any merit, it can be presumed the faculty and administrators opposed to the Center merely saw the “R” next to his name and went off from there.

Groveman said the donors are very disturbed the Regents have not repudiated such language, or at least cleaned up the graffiti that the replica office was occasionally tagged with.

“Given the clear directives outlined in the 2017 Resolution, the donors, community leaders and many former Regents and CLU officials are left deeply concerned by the university’s recent actions,” said Groveman. “We believe that CLU’s reversal and hindrance of the Gallegly Center’s intended operations are the result of  bowing to a misguided and unrestrained political cancel culture generated by a few CLU employees and in breach of contractual obligations.”

Groveman is hoping the Regents will address the situation immediately and it is reported the Board has been made aware of the situation and is currently being provided with the relevant details.

A CLU spokesperson did not wish to go into the details of the allegation – the letter is not a lawsuit but Gallegly’s lawsuit is based roughly on the same of facts – but did specifically take Groveman to task for how he delivered the demand:

“On August 31, just before 5 pm, we received two boxes of documents. The counsel who shipped them likely took weeks if not months to prepare their content and sent them at the most inconvenient of times for us, as we were in our first week of classes. Rather than emailing the documents to Cal Lutheran’s outside counsel or general counsel, they chose the theatrical approach of arriving on campus unannounced, rolling boxes of documents across campus and interrupting the university’s business operations.  

At Cal Lutheran, we put the needs of our students first and were, therefore, not able to review the documents immediately.  

The decision to apparently leak at least some of the contents of the boxes is clearly an attempt to use emotion, partial information, and theatrics to influence how people in Ventura County perceive Cal Lutheran.”

If this is a typical example of the lack of transparency on the part of CLU Groveman alleges, he may just have a point.