ASU Professor Takes DEI Lawsuit to Arizona Supreme Court | The Brief

What did your university ask you to do that you decided to sue them? ASU is requiring its employees to take DEI training. State universities cannot teach race blame. ASU has a whole team of in-house lawyers. They didn't use those lawyers. They hired Hillary Clinton's law firm. Why does ASU hire them? At what point would you say DEI is not only not inclusive, but it's actually discriminatory? They're assigning blame based on skin color, which is, I think, the definition of racism. Inclusion ends up meaning excluding anybody else who disagrees with you. But a very interesting thing happened last week. I got a letter from my dean saying, hey, your classes are too Christian. What was the most or some of the most outrageous things you encountered in ASU's mandatory DEI training? So you've been a professor at Arizona State University, ASU, for over 20 years. What did your university ask you to do that was so objectionable you decided to sue them? Well, you know, this story actually starts in 2023 when I went to the defense of Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk and Robert Kiyosaki, who were invited to speak at ASU's Honors College. And the honors professors got together and they wrote a letter to their dean objecting. And the reason they objected is very important. They said that Dennis Prager is a white nationalist bigot and should not be allowed to speak at ASU's Honors College. And so, I came to their defense. I wrote some posts about this to say how absurd this is, that this kind of attack is going on from these professors. But they were successful. The event was held at ASU, but it was not allowed to be held at the Honors College. So, these professors successfully censored those three speakers from ASU. Now, in the middle of all this, ASU is requiring its employees to take DEI training. And the DEI training, you might think of like The Office with Michael Scott, something like that, right? That's what it's kind of like. But it gets into some really offensive stuff. I'm a Christian. And so it gets into some really offensive stuff about Christian missions and the Bible. And then, of course, the problem of whiteness and men in the patriarchy. And so I objected to this. I said, hey, this is not just about how to get along with diverse people at a university. This is taking shots that don't need to be taken. And I was contacted by the Goldwater Institute, which is a legal think tank here in Arizona, and they said, yeah, that actually breaks the law. Would you like to go to court over it? Because state universities, really any state agency, cannot teach race blame. And I think everyone knows that should be obvious, but when it gets packaged as whiteness, or going after Dennis Prager as a white nationalist bigot, for some reason the liberal universities think that's okay. So that was the beginning two and a half years ago of a court case that's now before the Arizona Supreme Court. So let me just ask you to be specific. You had spoken about whiteness, about taking offense as a Christian. What was the most or some of the most outrageous things you encountered in ASU's mandatory DEI training? Just enlighten us. Yeah, well, it presents this material from the perspective of what's called decolonizing ideology, which is a Marxist movement out of South America. And it's overtly Marxist. I mean, that's not me insulting them. They would say, yeah, we are a brand of Marxism. And so it would take shots at people based on skin color or based on religion. It would say things about Christianity or the Bible or missions being colonizing efforts to try to oppress the peoples of the world through their teaching. And so it wasn't even suggesting like this is one of many different views. It was just saying that's the narrative and you're supposed to agree with it. And then there was even a quiz that you had to take. Now, when I objected, ASU immediately dropped the quiz because the quiz is clearly compelled speech. But just the fact that they even had that, that you had to put down their answers, is the offensive part where you would not subject any other group to this kind of treatment. So let me play devil's advocates, because those particularly on the left would say, hang on a second, DEI is an acronym of three words. One of them is inclusion. And you, professor, are saying it's exclusionary. So at what point would you say DEI is not only not inclusive, but it's actually discriminatory? Yeah, I think it crosses the line because, I mean, obviously each of those three words, I think, are good words, you know, individually and together. Those are fine things to want. A state university should include everybody. You know, all taxpayers should have access to state universities. Private universities might be a little different, but if they take federal money, then they're going to be in the same boat. And so the problem isn't that. The problem is that what they do is they use positive words and then they bring in their ideology. And so inclusion actually, it's just like double talk. Inclusion ends up meaning excluding anybody else who disagrees with you. And so there was a whole segment on LGBTQ ideology. And it wasn't about, hey, you just need to be aware you'll be working with people who believe these things. It was, this is the truth of the matter. And you're going to be working with some bigots who don't believe LGBTQ stuff. And so that's where it's like, hey, this is crossing the line into forcing us to believe things that we don't believe as state employees. And so that's where I objected. But a very interesting thing happened last week. Yeah. So every year, we're state employees, and so we have to have annual reviews every year. And it's very mathematical. There's no room for subjectivity because of the kinds of problems I'm encountering. And so what happened for my 2025 annual review is that I got a letter from my dean saying, hey, your classes are biased. You're too Christian. And the evidence that I was given was so flimsy. And the classes that they're talking about, I have two classes. One of them is world religions. And the other one is a class I teach called philosophical issues in death and dying. And so I was given five of my questions out of, let's say, 100 or more. And these five questions were enough to prove I have a bias in my class. They were questions like this. Death should make us think about the meaning of life. Now, I thought that was so trivial. It's almost like, why do you ask that question? But it's a class on death and dying. So it's kind of like an introductory question. And if you know anything, hey, that's just one of my favorite authors, Viktor Frankl. That's not like uniquely Christian. And so I appealed this to our provost. And last week, I got the provost's official ruling. So this is the highest ruling that can happen at ASU. The end of the road for me. The provost agreed. These five questions. Prove my classes are too Christian. Now here's where it loops back around. Remember I said I defended Dennis Prager? Yeah. He actually came out to the Arizona Senate and we appeared before the Arizona Senate together on this issue. And the vice provost at ASU sent is the one who signed the letter that I'm too Christian. Jeez. Oh my, it's the inmates running the asylum. Look, let me ask you, Professor, before we move on, you alluded to the whiteness a couple of times. Number one, if you wouldn't mind just educating me and educating the viewers, In the eyes of the DEI bureaucrat, what do they mean when they say white privilege? And why do you have a problem, if not downright believe it to be racist, to suggest that people are born inherently or innately with this white privilege? Yeah, so it's another one of those things where they'll kind of pull in the unsuspecting person, because they'll say something which is kind of trivial, like, hey, there's been racism about skin color, where white was considered good and not white was considered bad. That's called whiteness. And so they'll say, yeah, that's true, that did happen. But then they'll say, and you're all racist just for having white skin. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, you participate in the same system, even if you've actively been out protesting against racism. Just by being white, you're born with privileges that make you a racist. And that's where I object because what they're doing then is they're assigning blame based on skin color, which is, I think, the definition of racism. So imagine a professor talking to a group of students and tells the students what I just said. And many of them in the class are white and many of them aren't. And they start looking around at each other and saying, hey, that guy's got pale skin. He must be a racist without ever knowing anything about his background. So do you think, given the problem you had just diagnosed, that universities, not just ASU and not just Harvard, but across the country, are increasingly in danger of teaching students not how to think, but what to think? Do you see that as a major problem affecting institutions of higher learning today? Yeah, I think that's one of my biggest fears as a philosopher, because what we do in logic or in philosophy 101 is we learn how to critically analyze arguments. So I'm all for that, including Christianity. In philosophy, we think we criticize everything. But what happens is that critical theory comes in, and it sounds good at first. Like, okay, critical theory, we're going to question stuff. But what they do is they critically analyze from a Marxist perspective, the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed. So all critical theory is, is the oppressors or whoever has money. And that's called the whiteness also. And everyone else is oppressed. And so then this is what gets to answer your question. They just push that on the students. And it's a very easy thing to sell in one sense, because most people, even if they technically are in the top 10%, most people don't believe they are. Most students don't believe they're that rich. And so you'll tell them, hey, you're part of the oppressed group, and there's this 1% of people who are the whiteness. And if we just took their money, life would be great. But they're really greedy. They won't let you have their money. But if you just took it and redistributed it, everything would be good. And so they're teaching that stuff. They're pushing that stuff. They're not actually teaching critical thinking. That's interesting. It's critical theory, not critical thinking. Let me get back to the case. In your mind, and I think I know what your answer is going to be, just full disclosure, should a public university have the right to require professors to participate in ideological training like DEI that they just fundamentally disagree with? Should you as a professor have that right to say no? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a basic right of academic freedom. It's a little bit unique about a university because we do have other kinds of training. For example, I just had to go through fire training. Like, which doors in my building do I go to if there's a fire? Or computer safety training. What do I do if I get an email that says, click this link and you'll win the Nobel Prize? And I click the link. What should I do? So I understand you got to have employee training. But the problem is when the employee training is simply a way to slip in this other ideology and you're forced to sit through it. One of the interesting things that happened in my case is that the ASU lawyers, and incidentally, I should tell you, ASU has a whole team of in-house lawyers that they pay a lot of money. They didn't use those lawyers. They hired a law firm, Perkins Coie. Do you know who that is? Okay. Perkins Coie is Hillary Clinton's law firm from 2016, the Russia dossier stuff. That was all that. Big Democrat mover and shaker law firm. Why does ASU hire them? What are they paying them? A thousand bucks an hour or something for poor old Anderson over here? But what they argued first is that, hey, you weren't disciplined. Nothing bad actually happened to you. You can't sue until something bad happens. Well, the bad thing, my lawyers argued, was sitting through it. That was the punishment. So if we made anyone else sit through, you know, any other demographic sit through racist training, just the fact of sitting through it would be enough for a lawsuit. It should also be true for Anderson. OK, so, you know, I think you just answered my next question because I was going to say, well, ASU have said in filings that you were not punished for refusing the training. So you have no claim. And your response is. Just being through the training was in itself a punishment. Is that correct? Yeah, I was subjected to racist and religious discrimination, which both federal and state law prohibit. When we first filed this case, the ASU administrators came out and said, there is no such training in the news. So we got these news articles saved. And so I shared screenshots. And so then they said, okay, the training exists, but it's not required. So I shared screenshots. Okay, it exists. It's required, but it doesn't have the kind of things Anderson says. And it's like, haven't you guys learned yet that I take screenshots? So I shared the screenshots. And so then they flipped to Anderson doesn't have standing. So it went from doesn't exist, not required, doesn't contain this. You know what? You don't even have standing. We're not going to talk about the case. So that's where we're at right now before the Supreme Court of Arizona is does a state State employee have standing to take a state institution to Court. And two of the justices asked what I think were brilliant questions of ASU's lawyer, which was this. There's a principle in American law called where there's a right, there's a remedy. It goes all the way back to Marbury versus Madison. And where there's a right, there's a remedy means that the government gives people something and that is then violated. The people have the right to pursue a remedy in court. And so this law provides me with protection. That protection was violated, so therefore I should be able to sue. We don't have the decision yet. It could take 10 months or more, but I think that those were some good questions that gave me some hope. So are there other professors at ASU or colleagues of yours who see that this educational training was in fact punishment as well? Yeah, you know, I've talked to some others, and it can be a very dispiriting thing to work at a state university. And so one noticeable... For a whole host of reasons. Yeah, but one noticeable response I got from the few conservative colleagues, I don't want to give the impression there's lots of conservative colleagues. Incidentally, the college fixed it, a survey around 2024 of ASU. I think out of the survey, I think 2,000 professors and 97% of them said they're left or far left. And so, but the few I do know... The response is kind of like, yeah, I mean, that's just what they do. You know, you just got to put up with that stuff if you want to be in academia. But I'm asking the question, why should we have to put up with that stuff? That doesn't seem fair. It certainly wouldn't be true on the other side if somehow one day MAGA Republicans take over universities and there's 97% pro-Trump. The other side would say, hey, it's not fair. We have to go through MAGA training. Your case reached the Arizona Supreme Court. What could your lawsuit mean for professors, public employees, and even students across this country should you prevail? Well, you know, it's an interesting thing about this case, and I think that's why it might take a little bit of time for the justices to write their opinion. This is going to be a landmark employment case, not just a university case across Arizona. Briefly, the issue is that the law I'm suing under doesn't specify who can sue, but a lot of laws don't. So when it does specify, that's called an explicit right to take a court case. And so it might say, like, employees can sue. The problem with taking that approach in a law is that you have to then specify everybody that you want. Like it could become a long list. Like Bob, Bob's grandma, her hairdresser. So instead of that, what laws will do is they'll simply have what's called an implicit right of standing. And the implicit right of standing means it doesn't say in the law, but Arizona has a test well established in our legal precedent for when a law does have implicit standing. So my lawyers are arguing this one does and their lawyers are arguing it doesn't, which means either way, this is going to now be part of that test going forward. Even if we lose in the future, there'll be a lawsuit where someone says, hey, I'm citing Anderson versus ASU because of this. But if I lose, I've told my colleagues, hey, you guys might not like my public positions on conservative things, but if I lose, you lose. Because again, using the example where it flips to the MAGA Republicans are in charge of ASU, you can't bring a case either. Now, I think they're so comfortable. They have no fear of that happening because it seems so outlandish that that's not on their mind. They figure they'll always be in power. But the American system is based on the idea that, hey, power flips back and forth sometimes, and you want to make sure that you have protections for people who aren't currently in power, because that could flip any time where you're now not the one in power. So, Professor, what are the challenges you have seen, either anecdotally or across the country, of those who push back against DEI policies? And as in, these students or professors, do they risk being punished by the universities? Do they risk... Social isolation, like what happens to those who call out DEI? Yeah, really, up until the second Trump administration, even under the first one, it was dangerous to call it out. And students had to lie, meaning they had to write papers that they knew their professors' opinions approved, even though they may not personally. And that's a horrible thing to teach our students that they need to be liars to get ahead. But yeah, we as professors, there was no speaking up. We would just be isolated. I have tenure, but tenure won't protect me. If they rule that I've been insubordinate over multiple occasions, so if they decide, hey, we told you your classes are too Christian, what did you do? And let's say I remove those five questions. It won't help. They'll look at my class and they'll say, well, but look at these other five questions because it's such ambiguous. evidence. And they'll say, look, we asked you to stop being so Christian, Professor Anderson. You didn't listen. Tenure does not protect you from insubordination. And so this kind of thing makes you say, hey, I just wanted to be a professor. I wanted to write books and teach students. I'm not going to speak up. So, Professor, we on this show at PragerU have been talking about reforming institutions of higher learning for At least a year, I got my political trajectory started through suing my university as well. So I'm just curious, if you could change one thing about the way American universities teach their students, what would that thing be? Yeah, I think it would go to exactly what you and I were talking about. We've got to get back to teaching students about logic and truly critical thinking and weed out the Marxist dialectic, which right now rules the humanities. And every single branch of the humanities is ruled by the dialectic. Yeah. Unfortunately, we have to agree. It's quite a damning indictment on our institutions, but I digress. Professor Owen Anderson of ASU, appreciate you making the time and perhaps more importantly, for the fight that you're waging. We, of course, are going to be following that case pretty soon and hope to have you back on. Thank you so much. Well, thank you so much for watching this week's episode of The Brief. Feel free to keep the conversation going by leaving a comment below. You can also offer an idea for a topic you would like to see covered. Also ensuring you're liking, subscribing, following, so you do not miss any new episode of The Brief. And we'll see you next week.