Trustee Responsibility Free Speech

Francesca Block
The Free Press

Excerpt: An activist group in California has paid nearly 100 public high schoolers $1,400 each to learn how to fight for racial and social justice, The Free Press has learned.

Contracts between Long Beach Unified School District and Californians for Justice from 2019 to 2023, exclusively obtained by The Free Press, show the school district used taxpayer funds to pay the group nearly $2 million to facilitate equity and leadership development training for students and teachers. In addition to the student stipends, the contracts also allocated a total of $20,200 to 13 parents for participating in the group’s programs.

The Editors
National Review

Excerpt: Last week, the University of Florida peremptorily announced that it had ended its ill-fated experiment with DEI. “The University of Florida,” the college’s missive confirmed, has “closed the Office of the Chief Diversity Officer, eliminated DEI positions and administrative appointments, and halted DEI-focused contracts with outside vendors.”

As a practical matter, one would not wish the men and women of Tallahassee to micromanage every last feature of academic life in Gainesville, but, evidently, that is not what is happening in this case. Instead, the state’s authorities are establishing minimum guidelines for how taxpayers’ money can be spent, and they are doing so in a manner that upholds the most precious of America’s ideals.

Washington Times
Stephen Dinan

The University of Virginia shells out $20 million a year to employees who work on diversity, equity and inclusion, according to a new analysis of the public school’s spending.

OpenTheBooks.com said the university has at least 235 employees whose job titles signal they do DEI work for the school.

They are paid a total of $15 million, and the state-funded school spends another $5 million on annual benefits, according to OpenTheBooks’ calculations.

Ben Raab
Yale News

Excerpt: Timothy Snyder evacuated his “Hitler, Stalin, and Us” lecture on Thursday afternoon after a Communist activist group entered the classroom and would not leave.

Around 10 demonstrators affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party showed up at the classroom in William Harkness Hall five minutes after the start of class and began shouting at Snyder while holding up signs and recording students. “It seemed like they just wanted to shout Professor Snyder down, not engage in any sort of discussion,” William Wang ’26, a student in the class, told the News. “After a few minutes of shouting it was clear they weren’t gonna go away. Eventually, we just left and went to another classroom.”

Bryan Caplan
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal

Excerpt: I recently discovered that George Mason University, where I teach, plans to adopt a “Just Societies” course requirement. “Students entering Mason in Fall 2024 or later will be required to take two Mason Core courses that have the Just Societies flag.”

If you read any closer, you unsurprisingly discover that this is a thinly veiled woke-indoctrination requirement. Students are not exploring substantively different views on justice; they are hearing about “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” in all its Orwellian wonder.

Jim Martin
The News & Observer

Excerpt: Recently, all Davidson College student-athletes were required to watch a film entitled, “I’m Not Racist, Am I?” Its provocative message disavows “The Dream.” Regardless of what you think, say or do, it insists that if you’re white, you are racist. If you’re of color, you cannot be racist. In their lexicon, “racist” is just a synonym for “white.”

Oddly, some activists believe this fiction. They want to indoctrinate America’s youth for the noble goal of eliminating racism. Great. Then why insist upon bogus definitions that evoke only insult and injury? How can racism be eliminated if some of us remain melanin challenged? Their Cynical Race Theory is malicious and unworkable.