UC Riverside ‘DEI Guardians’ Persecute Professor for Objecting to Racial Hiring Preferences

Diversity, equity and inclusion proponents are not very inclusive of anybody who disagrees with them.

In a harrowing Wall Street Journal opinion piece published earlier this week, University of California at Riverside Professor Perry Link recounted how he was hounded, badgered and persecuted by school administrators, most notably the University Chancellor, after he merely objected to giving preferences to a faculty candidate based on race.

In the December 11 article, titled “UC Riverside’s DEI Guardians Came After Me,” Link described how the university “censured me  after I spoke out against race taking over the faculty hiring process.”

He was ultimately censured by UC Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox and charged with having “discriminated” against “individuals seeking employment” for objecting to racial preferences.

Ironically, racial preferences in hiring by public employers or public universities has long been illegal in California anyway. And if the faculty search committee was flouting the law in this one case that Link flagged it makes you wonder how common the practice is at UC Riverside and other public universities across California.

As Link tells it, the fracas dated to December 2022 when he objected to colleagues on a faculty search committee boosting an unqualified black candidate.

He wrote that “[Candidate X] is lively and charming—and yes, Black, which is great—but I can’t say that I found his sophistication and experience up to the level of our top candidates.”

Link then “expressed my worry that some of my colleagues would, as they had in the past, make the applicant’s race their “overriding criterion.”

In other words he wanted candidates judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin to paraphrase Martin Luther King’s famous color blind adage.

But diversity, equity and inclusion elevates race above everything else–fetishizes it, really. So the DEI machinery soon clamped down hard on Link.

“The committee’s unofficial diversity, equity and inclusion guardian, Heidi Brevik-Zender, had proposed that we boost this black applicant ahead of several others and place him on our shortlist. My comments came in response to this boosting. Someone then reported them to deans and vice provosts without notice to me, triggering a university discipline machine that couldn’t be stopped.”

He was soon summoned to a meeting with administrators but they would not specify exactly what he had done wrong–kind of like Franz Kafka’s famous novel,  The Trial about somebody never told the crime for which he is being prosecuted?

“The first I heard of the complaint against me came in January 2023 when I was asked to meet with Associate Dean Kiril Tomoff, Dean Daryle Williams and Vice Provost Daniel Jeske,” Link recounts. “Mr. Williams told me that I had said or written something that had ‘upset people’ and that I should recuse myself from the search committee. I asked—twice—what my upsetting words were, and no one would say. I told the dean that I couldn’t resign for something unstated.”

Several days later, Dean Williams dismissed Link from the faculty search committee, still without telling him precisely what he had said wrong.

“Later Mr. Williams filed an allegation against me with our campus Academic Senate. He said I had violated the Faculty Code of Conduct by making “adverse and unwarranted comments about the race, gender, or national origin of the candidate pool.” He still hadn’t named the words. He also claimed that I breached the search committee’s confidentiality.”

Then Phil Brisk, a vice provost who handles discipline, swung into action. He told Link that he could negotiate for a 10% salary reduction–or alternatively face more discipline.

Absent a pay cut “my case would go to a Charges Committee, a group of faculty members who would investigate the claims. If they found ‘probable cause,’ my case would then go to a faculty Privilege and Tenure Committee for a ‘hearing’ that amounts to a trial.”

Link decided to fight back against the railroading. “Feeling annoyed and disinclined to negotiate, I opted to let my case go to the Charges Committee and filed a case of my own against Mr. Williams. I argued chiefly that he had violated my right to due process because he had punished me without specifying my offense. The Charges Committee eventually, and without dissent, decided that my actions didn’t warrant a disciplinary hearing but that Mr. Williams’s violation of due process did.”

Despite this victory the DEI machinery still came down hard on Link, “as the discipline machine was already in gear.”

Indeed, “Brisk countermanded these findings” against Williams for railroading Link.

As the professor recounts, “He set aside my complaint against Mr. Williams and decided to send the charges against me to the Privilege and Tenure Committee for a disciplinary hearing. Finally, on Dec. 6, 2023, Mr. Brisk called me to his office and for the first time told me what my offending words, written almost a year earlier, had been.”

Next, a full scale trial ensued over Link’s thought crimes. He was being put on trial for words, not actions.

“Four days of hearings were held between February and April 2024,” Link recalls. “They had all the fixtures of a trial—prosecutor, briefs, swearings-in, witnesses, cross-examinations and more. The prosecutor, an attorney for the University of California, labeled my actions ‘egregious’ and said I was a candidate for ‘termination.’ The jury consisted of three professors from various departments.”

He was largely vindicated. “In June 2024, they recommended that I not be appointed to any search committees for a time—fine by me—but, more important, unanimously concluded on all the administrations’ charges that my actions “did not violate the Faculty Code of Conduct.”

Despite the vindication, University of California at Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox decided to censure Link anyway.

“Still the machine moved forward. Though he agreed that I didn’t violate any confidentiality rule, Mr. Wilcox disagreed with the committee’s conclusion on the racial charges and sent me a letter of censure. Formally he had the right to do this. In the University of California process, for all its mimicry of civil law, a case is brought by ‘the Administration,’ and the final authority is also ‘the Administration.’ In essence, Mr. Wilcox was both plaintiff and judge.”

Link concludes his piece by talking about how the DEI bureaucracy tolerated no dissent.

“Resistance to the machine causes it to accelerate.,” he writes. “The penalty for my words began as a demand that I resign from a search committee. A year later, those same words were enough to threaten me with a pay cut or even termination. Why the dramatic escalation? Because I didn’t bend. To the machine, that was more offensive than the original affront.”

Link told the California Globe that DEI theoretically has noble goals but it has been perverted. “

“The ideals behind DEI are good, in my view,” Link emailed. “I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life trying to make things better for underdogs.  When DEI ‘training’ came along at UCR, I reacted against it because the curriculum was puerile and the ‘teachers’ far below my level in thinking about such things.”

Link said he considered fighting the machine to be something of an experiment.

“When the DEI machine turned on me a couple of years ago, my attitude was to let it run its course–sort of as a research project–and see what happened.,” he explained. “My idea was to write about it, which I just did, for the WSJ, but I want to write more, in more depth, especially on the question of ‘How did this very odd phenomenon come about?'”

The professor added that the most important principle at stake for him in fighting the machine was “whether [academia] can return to its original purpose, which is learning, in the two forms we call ‘teaching’ and ‘research.'”

John Warren, the UC Riverside associate vice chancellor for communications, did not respond to an email asking for comment on the Wall Street Journal and why the school is apparently hiring based on race in violation of California law.