Profs slam DEI in Wall Street Journal

In recent letters to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal, two professors have denounced college diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies as antithetical to academic freedom. 

Mark J. Fronke, a retired accounting professor at the California Community Colleges (CCC) system, noted that he was asked in his final years of teaching to reduce his grading standards away from a traditional 10-point grading scale in order to “promote equity” and “accommodate students who weren’t prepared for the rigors of the course.”

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“My standard response was to suggest that the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and California State Board of Accountancy aren’t likely to lower the standards required for licensure to ‘promote equity,’” Fronke stated. 

“There were many other examples of institutional efforts to support foolish notions of equity and inclusion that clearly didn’t benefit student success. Some were straightforwardly political, such as encouraging faculty and staff to sign a statement supporting the Black Lives Matter movement,” he continued.

He concluded his piece by suggesting that the “entire CCC system has lost the focus of what higher education is supposed to provide.”

In a separate letter, Keith J. Hand, a law professor at the University of California, San Francisco, also rejected DEI.

“Campus activists who want to limit expression inconveniently face clear university rules that protect academic freedom,” he wrote. “So they are working to amend the rules to require employees to promote certain ideological principles.”

“Organizations such as Heterodox Academy and FIRE, which connect and support ideologically diverse faculty committed to fostering a culture of open expression and inquiry, have a better model for countering illiberal campus trends.”

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Fronke and Hands’ letters came in response to a lawsuit by Bakersfield College Professor Daymon Johnson, who sued the CCC system in June for allegations of stifling free speech and dissident views of faculty through its DEI policies. 

“Almost everything I teach violates the new DEIA requirements—not just by failing to advance the DEIA and anti-racist/racist ideology, but also by criticizing it,” Johnson states in the lawsuit. “I fear that if I continue teaching my courses as I have designed them, I will surely be deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ in my upcoming evaluations.”

Campus Reform has reached out to Fronke, Hand, and Johnson for comment. This article will update this story accordingly.