At times like this, we’re very lucky to have organizations like FIRE.

Alex Morey reports at their blog.

FIRE Warns Occidental Against Proposal to Create ‘Institutional Orthodoxy’

In a letter sent yesterday, FIRE urged the faculty governance board at Occidental College to reconsider a resolution that, if implemented, would seriously harm the free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of conscience rights of Occidental’s faculty.

The draft resolution, proposed by the college’s Faculty Council and scheduled for an intra-council vote on December 1, calls for “widespread institutional change in the culture of the College” in response to protests over racial inequality that have swept college campuses across the country. However, in his letter to the council’s president, Professor Anthony Chase, FIRE’s Director of the Individual Rights Defense Program, Peter Bonilla, wrote that the proposed changes would “effectively impose an institutional orthodoxy on faculty that is incompatible with the college’s academic mission.” Specifically, Peter wrote:

These provisions include mandatory diversity training for faculty, proposals to re-center college curricula around issues of diversity, social justice, and identity, and the call for a new system to report “microaggressions” committed by Occidental faculty. In its current state, the faculty should reject this resolution as a threat to their fundamental rights.

In the letter, FIRE noted that while many Occidental faculty may support the underlying concerns that motivated the proposal, imposing mandatory diversity training and diversity curricula risks pressuring faculty “to adopt specific ideological viewpoints that infringe on both their private conscience and their academic freedom.”