FIRE Files Suit to Ask Federal Court to Declare that DEI Statements Constitute Compelled Speech
From FIRE: FIRE is suing to stop regulations that force our clients to espouse controversial views about “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Here is an excerpt from FIRE's announcement today:
Today, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on behalf of six California community college professors to halt new, systemwide regulations forcing professors to espouse and teach politicized conceptions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”Each of the professors 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 California Community Colleges system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching.
The regulations explicitly require professors to pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. Professors must “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and they must 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.” Faculty performance and tenure will be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of the government’s viewpoints.
“I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction?” asked Reedley College professor Bill Blanken. “What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”
“These regulations are a totalitarian triple-whammy,” said FIRE attorney Daniel Ortner. “The government is forcing professors to teach and preach a politicized viewpoint they do not share, imposing incomprehensible guidelines, and threatening to punish professors when they cross an arbitrary, indiscernible line.”
DEI requirements are controversial within academia. FIRE’s research indicates that half of professors believe mandatory diversity statements violate academic freedom. The sole mention of academic freedom in California’s model framework frames it an inconvenience, warning professors not to “‘weaponize’ academic freedom” to “inflict curricular trauma on our students.”
“Hearing uncomfortable ideas is not ‘curricular trauma,’ and teaching all sides of an issue is not ‘weaponizing’ academic freedom,” said Loren Palsgaard, a professor of English at Madera Community College and a plaintiff in the suit. “That’s just called ‘education.’”
The Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry: A Roadmap to Get American Universities Back on Track
As seen in some of my posts, more than a few American Universities have decided, officially and/or de facto, that their core mission does not include unbridled learning driven by curiosity. Here is a brief description of how the new Princeton Principles came to be:
On April 14-5, 2023, a group of eminent scholars and practitioners gathered at Princeton University to explore ways to strengthen and rebuild the open, rules-based international order. In the shadow of the COVID pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine, they searched for “first principles” and reform ideas for twenty-first century global governance architecture, focusing in particular on rules and institutions for the world economy and great power security cooperation.
The newly published Princeton Principles for a Campus Culture of Free Inquiry seek to "advance free inquiry, honor intellectual merit, and respect the diverse ideas that arise naturally from the pursuit of truth." These are detailed principles that address many of the problems that have bedeviled universities, especially over the past ten years. Further, these Princeton Principles perfectly complement the Chicago Principles and the Kalven Committee Recommendations.
The Hubris that Resides in the Heart of the Censor
Glenn Greenwald, discussing journalism and censorship with Ben Shapiro:
At the heart of the censor resides hubris, more than anything else. If you look at the intellectual history of humanity, it's nothing but trial and error. What people believe in one generation is Absolute Truth. It gets to be regarded by the next generation as a grievous error. That's the way that we advance. That's what makes life exciting: The fact that we err, we're fallible, we're constantly in search of the truth, we're using our reasoning skills and our cognitive abilities to try and figure out what is true and what is false.
There are a lot of things I believe, very, very, very passionately, I honestly have never ever gotten to the point where I felt like what I believe in is so clearly and indisputably and permanently true that I believe it ought to be illegal for anyone to express an opinion different than the one that I had. I couldn't imagine ever finding the hubris necessary to believe that about myself that I now reside above the human history of trial and error. But that's really what these people believe. And I think that is the reason censorship is so appealing: once you convince yourself that you were on the side of objective good, whoever disagrees with you or sees the world differently than you is the enemy of all--evil--and you can only see the world in that kind of binary way. It almost becomes not just tolerable, but necessary to say those people shouldn't be able to speak because they're fonts of falsity, lies and deceit, whereas I am the owner of the truth. I feel extremely uncomfortable believing that about myself, even though there are a lot of things I really strongly believe in and believe are true. I just never have gotten to that point. And can't imagine getting to that point.
Once you adopt a view, your political opponents are no longer people who are misguided and wrong, or even ill-intentioned . . . they're essentially on the level of Hitler and Nazism. That's the single worst evil we could possibly think of. If you really believe that the United States faces a choice between remaining a liberal democracy on the one hand, or succumbing to a Hitlerian, white nationalist dictatorship, if that's something that you actually believe, on some level it becomes rational to say: "I think the evil we're facing is so overarching that anything and everything we do, censoring, lying, sabotaging, cheating and deceiving becomes, again, not just morally justifiable, but morally necessary.
Martin Gurri: The Path from Liberal Democracy to Liberal Authoritarianism
Martin Gurri details the path to present times where many of those on the Left who abhorred government-imposed censorship ten year ago now embrace it. His article is long, detailed an excellent. Title is: "The New Censorship: How the establishment Left embraced government control of digital speech." Here is an excerpt:
The Democratic Party is the natural home of the establishment Left. To this arrangement, the Left brings apparent advantages like the reflexive applause of the New York Times, but also, less evidently, a heavy load of ideological baggage. Its doctrines tend to be unpopular even among Democrats. Most blacks oppose defunding the police, for example. Most Hispanics disapprove of open borders. Most Democrats don’t believe that grievance should trump merit. If put to a vote, these propositions would lose. The Left must therefore transform them into moral commandments, beyond the reach of politics. In the digital age, this can be accomplished only by policing and controlling the Web—and censorship of that magnitude is possible only if Biden or some other Democrat holds the presidency after 2024.
- Go to the previous page
- 1
- …
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- …
- 38
- Go to the next page