When Dr. Tabia Lee was hired by De Anza College to lead its Office of Equity, Social Justice, and Multicultural Education, she was excited by the prospect of building bridges and making a difference on the California campus. Instead, she was fired for refusing to adopt the dishonest “critical social justice ideology” that had captured the school.
Dr. Lee, who is black, was rebuked for using the word “equality” and accused of “white speaking” and “white splaining.” During campus conversations and workshops, she found a hostility to debating ideas. By questioning a DEI orthodoxy that celebrates indoctrination and elevates identity categories above individual dignity, she was accused of “leading people to danger.”
Dr. Lee’s story—a cautionary tale of what can happen when ideological orthodoxy replaces academic inquiry—is featured in the latest episode of the Goldwater Institute’s new Dismantling DEI podcast.
Read more here.
Watch Dismantling DEI in its entirety here, or listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
As the CEOs of their districts, school superintendents are some of Arizona’s highest paid government workers—earning upwards of $500,000—but their salaries alone don’t tell the full story. School districts regularly hide the true cost from taxpayers. That’s the key takeaway from the Goldwater Institute’s newest report, The Hidden Ways School Superintendents Are Paid, by Christopher Thomas.
In his report, Thomas exposes ten little-known perks and extras that dramatically inflate superintendent compensation, including: multiple retirement packages; monthly car allowances large enough to lease high-end sports cars; and massive vacation-leave banks that can be cashed out for extra pay. One Phoenix-area superintendent is taking home nearly a half-million dollars per year in salary and add-on benefits.
Thomas, Goldwater’s Director of Litigation Strategy for Education Policy, collected and analyzed superintendent contracts from 41 of Arizona’s largest districts. It wasn’t easy—most of the districts went to great lengths to keep their contracts under wraps. But taxpayers deserve to know, and the system of secrecy erodes public trust.
Read more here.
At Virginia’s public universities, 55% of students say their professors continue to teach that the United States is “a systemically racist and oppressive country.” Meanwhile, conservative students are still keeping their views on the down-low, and for good reason; at Virginia Commonwealth University, for example, 47% of students say that shouting down speakers is acceptable, while a whopping 21% are okay with using violence to silence speech they disagree with.
Those are just some of the shocking and problematic findings of a new survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The survey shows that despite some recent wins in the ongoing effort to dismantle discriminatory “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs, public colleges and universities remain firmly controlled by progressives who promote leftist and anti-American narratives, writes the Goldwater Institute’s Tim Minella.
Minella argues that the survey results demonstrate the urgency to reform and restore public universities to their core missions: the pursuit of knowledge and the education of citizens. He points specifically to Goldwater’s suite of higher education reforms, including the Abolish DEI Bureaucracies policy and the Freedom from Indoctrination Act.
Read more here.
