Racist programs and activities do not belong in our state. But in the name of so-called “progress,” they have taken Arizona’s universities by storm. This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. Back in 2010, our state’s voters passed Proposition 107. This amendment to Arizona’s Constitution banned affirmative action programs in the state that were administered by statewide or local units of government, including state agencies, cities, counties, and school districts. But the left found a loophole and has been working to exploit it ever since.
Using words that sound harmless like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion” (DEI), our universities have been flying under the radar in an attempt to indoctrinate students and bring racial discrimination back to campus.
At ASU, the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication currently requires some of its students to take a course called, “Diversity and Civility at Cronkite.” And the Goldwater Institute recently revealed that more than 100 classes offered in ASU’s Spring 2024 catalog include terms like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” The University of Arizona’s medical schools in Tucson and Phoenix have been the epitome of DEI best practices—with DEI offices, requirements to complete six hours of DEI credit, and more. And NAU has launched multiple initiatives to increase the number of Native American and Hispanic science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates, including revising graduate admissions processes to increase inclusivity and diversity.
But it’s not just students who have been affected by DEI programs…
Arizona State University (ASU) is facing a lawsuit over the inclusivity training it mandates for faculty.
The Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute sued the university earlier this month over the allegedly discriminatory training, on behalf of longtime ASU philosophy and religious studies professor Dr. Owen Anderson. The organization specifically alleged that ASU’s training violated Arizona law, A.R.S. § 41-1494(A), prohibiting trainings, orientations, or therapies that present any blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex.
“Arizona state law prohibits mandatory training for state employees and use of taxpayer resources to teach doctrines that discriminate based on race, ethnicity, sex, and other characteristics,” said Goldwater Staff Attorney Stacy Skankey in a press release.
Contested aspects of the ASU training, “ASU Inclusive Communities,” required faculty to acknowledge the history of white supremacy and social conditions persisting its existence as a structural phenomenon; society’s normalization of white supremacy; the sociohistorical legacy of racism, sexism, homophobia, and structural inequalities that impact minority faculty; white privilege; antiracism; and the relationship between sexual identities and power and the privilege of heterosexuality.
The training also included a video to which Anderson objected. The video encouraged faculty to “critique whiteness,” and to ascribe definite beliefs of good and evil as inherently racist.
“And what colonization did, was it really created this system of binary thinking,” stated the video. “There were folks that were inherently good and folks that were inherently bad, and that led to the systems of superiority that were then written into the foundational documents of our Nation.”
In addition to completing the training, ASU required faculty to pass an exam. The correct answers for that exam reinforced controversial concepts of systemic bias, intersectionality, land acknowledgement, equity, decolonization, microaggressions, and social justice. The Goldwater Institute claimed in their lawsuit that the inclusivity training only served to teach concepts of blame or judgment based on race, ethnicity, or sex.
“The Inclusive Communities training provides discriminatory concepts including, but not limited to: white people are inherently racist and oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; heterosexuals are inherently sexist and oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; white people should receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of their race or ethnicity; white people bear responsibility for actions committed by other white people; land acknowledgement statements are a way of holding one race or ethnicity responsible for the actions committed by other members of the same race or ethnicity; transformative justice calls for an individual to bear responsibility for actions committed by other members of the same race, ethnic group or sex; and dominant identities (whites or heterosexuals) are treated morally or intellectually superior to other races, ethnic groups or sexes.”
As justification for its call of decolonization, the ASU training also challenged the validity and goodness of the American founding.
ASU’s required employee training, called “inclusive communities,” teaches that the Founding Documents of the United States, and its history and laws, are tied to white supremacy. Should believing that be a requirement of employment? @Ann_Atkinson_AZ@SethLeibsohn@charliekirk11…
In a press release, Anderson said that his employment shouldn’t hinge on his submitting to ideas that conflict with his beliefs.
“This ‘training’ is simply racism under the guise of DEI. It goes against my conscience, and I want no part of it,” said Anderson.
The contents of this training were obtained last May through a public records request by the Goldwater Institute. Prior to filing the lawsuit earlier this month, the organization sent a letter to the Arizona Board of Regents last fall asking ASU to cease and desist spending on the inclusivity training and others like it that allegedly run afoul of state antidiscrimination law.
The university requires faculty to repeat the inclusivity training every two years.
The case, Anderson v. Arizona Board of Regents, is in the Maricopa County Superior Court.
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Arizona State University requires employees to complete inclusiveness training every two years.
This includes three modules: Inclusive Communities, preventing harassment and discrimination, and Title IX duty to report.
Mandatory training videos include “Fighting Gender Bias at Work,” and “Understanding Intersectionality.”
“The view here is actually an expansive view of inclusion, not a very narrow one,” said Bryan Brayboy, vice president of social advancement at ASU in an introduction video.
The stated goal of training on inclusive communities is to “help create awareness, develop skills to meet the needs of diverse students and develop teams of people capable of working together to advance the ASU mission,” according to the webpage with the training modules.
Other available trainings at ASU include:
Affirmative action
Age discrimination
Americans with Disabilities Act
Diversity in the workplace
How to strategically address social justice matters in the workplace
Implicit bias and microaggressions
Implicit bias in recruitment
Tackling implicit bias and microaggressions
The webpage says ASU has more than 80,000 students on its campuses and more than 90,000 learners online. ASU is home to students from all 50 states and nearly 150 different countries.
“That creates a rich blend of backgrounds, making ASU highly inclusive and socioeconomically diverse,” the site says.
Arizona’s three public universities all promote diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, according to a Goldwater Institute report.
In the fall of 2022, ASU began requiring diversity statements from approximately 81% of job applicants.
Northern Arizona University required diversity statements from almost 73% of job applicants, and the University of Arizona required diversity statements from almost one third of job applicants.
The universities also encouraged applicants to incorporate critical race theory in written portions of their applications.
In August 2023, all three universities eliminated the use of diversity statements for job applicants after the Goldwater Institute’s report.
Elizabeth Troutman is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send her news tips using this link.
Any sensible person can see that there is something seriously wrong with many American universities.
For several decades many of our most prestigious seats of learning have become hostile to free speech and genuine inquiry. Speech codes have been introduced to prevent so-called ‘microaggressions.’
Speakers that do not subscribe to ‘woke’ orthodoxies have been ‘de-platformed.’ Those that do get invited on to campus risk being mobbed, as recently happened to a federal judge at Stanford and Riley Gaines at San Francisco State.
Intellectual inquiry, too, has narrowed. Anyone presenting ideas outside the approved parameters risks having their career terminated. (See what happened to Harvard’s then-president, Larry Summers, in 2006 when he suggested that genetics might help explain why there are more male than female scientists.)
Then on October 7th, Hamas slaughtered over a thousand Israelis, most of them civilians. Far from condemning the massacre, student groups at Harvard, Cornell and other universities rushed to issue statements attacking Israel.
Anti-Israel protesters on campus made statements and chanted slogans that went beyond being merely rude or unpleasant. Some seemed antisemitic. Others sounded like they were calling for a Jewish genocide.
How come those campus speech codes suddenly no longer applied? Having spent years policing what could be said to avoid ‘microaggressions,’ where were the university authorities when Jewish students faced actual aggression?
Giving evidence before a Congressional committee the other week, Claudine Gay of Harvard appeared to suggest that however unpalatable the protesters might be, it was all part of their right to freedom of speech. “Our university embraces a commitment to free expression” she said. Both she, and Liz Magill of Penn, failed to confirm that calls for genocide of Jews violated the university’s code of conduct.
Free speech appears to apply at these universities when you want to call for genocide, but not if you want to talk about genetics.
Watching both Gay and Magill give evidence, they both appeared out of their depth. I may not have been the only person left wondering how either of them was appointed to their respective roles in the first place. (Some have unkindly suggested it may have something to do with ‘woke’ hiring practices.)
The problems at US universities run deeper than just a handful of poor appointments.
Many US universities, including some right here in Mississippi, have DEI, or Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, programs. This needs to stop. Now.
DEI can sound entirely harmless. Who could possibly be against supporting different groups of individuals, including people of different races, ethnicities, religions, abilities, genders, and sexual orientations? Pretty soon, however, DEI proves to be something much more sinister.
In the name of diversity, some US universities have been systematically discriminating against some Americans on the basis of their race, limiting admissions to ‘overrepresented’ groups. In the name of equity, US universities have set out to address structural inequalities – historic and current – that advantage some and disadvantage others. In the name of inclusion, those with the wrong views are excluded.
DEI is flawed because it demands we think in terms of groups of individuals, rather than just individuals. Universities that apply DEI no longer treat everyone on campus equally, but on the basis of their immutable characteristics. DEI is a fundamentally un-American ideal.
DEI is also a formula almost guaranteed to produce institutional incompetence. Imagine, for a moment, that your favorite football or basketball team was to be run on the basis of DEI. If they recruited players on the basis of something other than their ability to play the game, they would lose. It makes no sense to run a public university that way.
What is to be done?
Last week, the Governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, showed the way. He issued an executive order banning DEI programs in public universities. Mississippi needs to do something similar.
An executive order in Mississippi could prohibit public universities from using state funds, property or resources for DEI initiatives.
To be sure, if the Governor was to do this in Mississippi there would be howls of protests. Various pundits would whine. It is what pundits do. Some will scream “supremacist!” There is nothing supremacist about insisting every American is treated equally. Others will warn that unless we continue to pay DEI staff six figure salaries Mississippi will somehow regress.
I suspect most Mississippi parents wanting the best for their children would breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the sort of scenes we witnessed at some of those so-called ‘elite’ institutions never happen here.
If we want to stop the ‘woke’ takeover of our institutions, we need to act now.
Northern Arizona University (NAU) will play a key role in an effort to validate indigenous knowledge as scientific knowledge using millions in federal funding.
Ora Marek-Martinez, NAU’s associate vice president of the Office for Native American Initiatives and assistant professor of anthropology, will be part of the University of Massachussetts’ newly-established Center for Braiding Indigenous Knowledges and Science (CBIKS). Marek-Martinez will serve as the CBIKS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) & Ethics Co-Lead for the center’s Southwest Hub.
Biden’s National Science Foundation (NSF) gave $30 million to CBIKS, a grant lasting five years. CBIKS may qualify for additional federal funding come 2028.
CBIKS researchers will focus initially on collaborating with indigenous Nanwalek Alaskans to study their traditional methods of salmon population preservation, indigenous Hawaiians to study their agricultural and food waste practices, and indigenous Australians to study environmental signs of climate change. Sonya Atalay, CBIKS Director and UMass Amherst Provost Professor of Anthropology, said that current scientific approaches were limited.
“CBIKS is about recognizing that Indigenous knowledge systems carry tremendous information and value, and it’s shortsighted to think that current research practices founded on Western knowledge systems are the only or ‘right’ approach,” said Atalay.
In one of CBIK’s initial postings, Atalay gave credence to the belief that rocks are alive, per indigenous knowledge.
Atalay criticized Michigan archaeologists for “disregard[ing] Native understanding of the rock as an animate being.” The rock in question bears Native American petroglyphs.
The rock wasn’t available for comment.
In order to obtain more indigenous knowledge beyond the consciousness of rocks, CPIKS will interact with 57 indigenous communities through its eight regional hubs across the country and in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.
The initiative is part of a larger effort by the Biden administration to prioritize “indigenous knowledge” into “research, policies, and decision making,” as noted in a memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy issued last November. The office, newly assigned cabinet-level status by the Biden administration, further declared indigenous knowledge to be “an aspect of the best available science” and directed its inclusion in “Highly Influential Scientific Assessments.” Those assessments directly shape costly federal policies.
The Biden administration wasn’t the first to attempt to assign parity to indigenous knowledge in scientific inquiry: as Washington Free Beacon reported, Canadian researchers reported adverse results after their country incorporated indigenous knowledge into policymaking, ranging from counterproductive at best to dangerous at worst.
“[T]he acceptance of spiritual beliefs as ‘knowledge’ by governments was dangerous because it could be used to justify any activity, including actions that were environmentally destructive,” stated a 2006 academic assessment.
One apparent outcome of catering to indigenous knowledge occurred when Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR) deputy director M. Kaleo Manuel, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner, delayed the release of water to combat the Maui fires because he insisted that officials obtain permission from a local taro farm. Taro is integral to Native Hawaiian agriculture and tradition.
Washington Free Beacon also reported some of the early fruits of the Biden administration’s indigenous knowledge labors: reinterpreting time as cyclical rather than sequential, entertaining proposals to pay tribal elders to assist in federal rulemaking, scrapping peer review processes, acknowledging alleged interdimensional relations between animals and humans,
NAU’s involvement in the Biden initiative aligns with the university’s policy of prioritizing Native American individuals in admissions and employment.
In February, NAU established a program providing free tuition regardless of income to Native Americans while requiring a financial threshold for students of all other races. They also pledged $10 million to “indigenous,” or prioritize indigenous people, in their curriculum. The equitable treatment of Native Americans resulted in a boost to the university’s enrollment.
The Office for Native American Initiatives, which Marek-Martinez helps lead, played an integral role in these equity efforts.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
