It's ridiculous that some people think the woke movement is perpetuated on college campuses. They're bastions of free speech. In fact, I've been asked to be the graduation speaker this year at Berkley's Commencement.
My speech? How Oprah has influenced racial harmony in America and her Book Club's personal impact on my life.
UC Riverside’s DEI Guardians Came After Me
The university censured me after I spoke out against race taking over the faculty hiring process.
By Perry Link, WSJ
Dec. 11, 2024 5:08 pm ET
Kim Wilcox, chancellor at University of California, Riverside, wrote me a letter of censure on Aug. 16. I was, in the administration’s view, guilty of “discrimination” against “individuals seeking employment.” I had made “unwarranted comments” about race.
Mr. Wilcox based his claim largely on the following statement, which I had written to colleagues on a faculty search committee in December 2022: “[Candidate X] is lively and charming—and yes, Black, which is great—but I can’t say that I found his sophistication and experience up to the level of our top candidates.” I expressed my worry that some of my colleagues would, as they had in the past, make the applicant’s race their “overriding criterion.”
The committee’s unofficial diversity, equity and inclusion guardian, Heidi Brevik-Zender, had proposed that we boost this black applicant ahead of several others and place him on our shortlist. My comments came in response to this boosting. Someone then reported them to deans and vice provosts without notice to me, triggering a university discipline machine that couldn’t be stopped.
The machine’s power surprised me, as did its accusation of racism. Never mind that during high school I shared a room with an adopted brother from Kenya, that I marched for black voting rights in college, and that my advocacy for human rights in China has had me blacklisted there since 1996.
I had several reasons to be against giving this applicant a leg up. It was unfair to the better-qualified candidates who were jumped over. It didn’t serve the university’s interest, which is to find the best possible practitioner. And I am not persuaded that artificial boosts are in the best interests of the boosted.
The first I heard of the complaint against me came in January 2023 when I was asked to meet with Associate Dean Kiril Tomoff, Dean Daryle Williams and Vice Provost Daniel Jeske. Mr. Williams told me that I had said or written something that had “upset people” and that I should recuse myself from the search committee. I asked—twice—what my upsetting words were, and no one would say. I told the dean that I couldn’t resign for something unstated.
A few days later Mr. Williams dismissed me from the committee—still without saying what my upsetting words were. I explained to some startled colleagues that I surmised I’d been removed for some race-related offense. Later Mr. Williams filed an allegation against me with our campus Academic Senate. He said I had violated the Faculty Code of Conduct by making “adverse and unwarranted comments about the race, gender, or national origin of the candidate pool.” He still hadn’t named the words. He also claimed that I breached the search committee’s confidentiality.
I then got an email from Philip Brisk, the vice provost who handles discipline. He told me I could negotiate with the administration. I was informed that one such solution might include a 10% pay cut for one year. Otherwise my case would go to a Charges Committee, a group of faculty members who would investigate the claims. If they found “probable cause,” my case would then go to a faculty Privilege and Tenure Committee for a “hearing” that amounts to a trial.
Feeling annoyed and disinclined to negotiate, I opted to let my case go to the Charges Committee and filed a case of my own against Mr. Williams. I argued chiefly that he had violated my right to due process because he had punished me without specifying my offense. The Charges Committee eventually, and without dissent, decided that my actions didn’t warrant a disciplinary hearing but that Mr. Williams’s violation of due process did.
But the discipline machine was already in gear. Mr. Brisk countermanded these findings. He set aside my complaint against Mr. Williams and decided to send the charges against me to the Privilege and Tenure Committee for a disciplinary hearing. Finally, on Dec. 6, 2023, Mr. Brisk called me to his office and for the first time told me what my offending words, written almost a year earlier, had been.
Four days of hearings were held between February and April 2024. They had all the fixtures of a trial—prosecutor, briefs, swearings-in, witnesses, cross-examinations and more. The prosecutor, an attorney for the University of California, labeled my actions “egregious” and said I was a candidate for “termination.” The jury consisted of three professors from various departments. In June 2024, they recommended that I not be appointed to any search committees for a time—fine by me—but, more important, unanimously concluded on all the administrations’ charges that my actions “did not violate the Faculty Code of Conduct.”
Still the machine moved forward. Though he agreed that I didn’t violate any confidentiality rule, Mr. Wilcox disagreed with the committee’s conclusion on the racial charges and sent me a letter of censure. Formally he had the right to do this. In the University of California process, for all its mimicry of civil law, a case is brought by “the Administration,” and the final authority is also “the Administration.” In essence, Mr. Wilcox was both plaintiff and judge.
During this ordeal, Mr. Brisk repeatedly proposed that we “settle.” At my age, 79, I felt I could say no. Had I been a younger scholar, I likely would have caved in despite my innocence. Life at the receiving end of the machine can be frightening.
Resistance to the machine causes it to accelerate. The penalty for my words began as a demand that I resign from a search committee. A year later, those same words were enough to threaten me with a pay cut or even termination. Why the dramatic escalation? Because I didn’t bend. To the machine, that was more offensive than the original affront.
As Mr. Wilcox was contemplating his final decision on my case, I offered to visit his office to hear face-to-face his decision and reasoning. He didn’t answer. A few months later I got a message from university counsel warning that all of what happened to me is confidential and that my writing about it “may result in discipline.”
Mr. Link is a distinguished professor of comparative literature emeritus at the University of California, Riverside.