ASU Professor Sues Over DEI Training. Could His Case Change the Law? | The Brief

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. 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, you know, 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 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 if 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 could 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 Fix did a survey around 2024 of ASU, and 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. I 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? 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. When it does specify, that's called an explicit right to take a court case. It might say 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. Like, 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. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, make sure you click the link below to watch the full episode of this week's The Brief.