Wait, I got that wrong – he’s suing because they *blocked him* from reading DEI tweets. Which is weird, because he seems like just the sort of guy that DEI would want to reach out to. Betsy Hammond has the report in the Oregonian here:
Portland State University political science professor Bruce Gilley, with backing from a national free speech group, has sued the person who ran the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion to unblock him from seeing or responding to the account’s posts.
The public university cannot, under the First Amendment, create a public online forum and prevent him from having equal access to it based on his point of view, the suit says.
Gilley, who champions race blindness and is highly critical of typical university diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, found himself blocked from @UOEquity in June after he retweeted one of its Tweets about racism with his comment “all men are created equal.” …
The complaint is here. Thanks to an anonymous reader from OSU for the alert. Sorry I cannot verify the rumor Oregon State will be suing Professor Gilley for disparagingly referring to UO as Oregon’s flagship university:
Oh, Bruce Gilley, the PSU professor who wrote the (in)famous article about colonialism that almost got him cancelled (plus enough death threats that he withdrew the paper). Kind of a chickenshit move by UO to try to banish him from their DEI twitter account. And while we’re at it, here’s an article about the actions of FIRE to pry information out of UO about its DEI requirements for prospective faculty, and faculty undergoing promotion and review. Quite a lot of cargo here for FIRE to unpack.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/university-of-oregon-subjects-faculty-to-dei-commitment-test-before-hiring-and-promotions/
The facts matter here. The article opens with:
“The University of Oregon is imposing a DEI mandate on current and prospective faculty requiring them to submit statements in which they are expected to showcase their commitment to rectifying systemic disadvantages facing minority students in their research, teaching, and service.”
This, at best, obscures the fact that the DEI statement in question is a product of collective bargaining and is a requirement laid out in the collective bargaining agreement which is ratified by faculty.
(Cue more outrage over collective bargaining and how they don’t represent all faculty).
In response to the predictable comments about collective bargaining, yes it is not perfect. And yet, United Academics is the legal representative of the faculty at UO and those that disagree with the collective bargaining agreement are invited to participate.
Of course the National Review article fails to mention (or at least filed to spin it far rightward) the fact that, in essence, faculty did this to themselves.
The UW senate recently very narrowly (<100 votes) defeated a similar requirement that required two-thirds of the vote to pass. The "freedom fighters" are simply on the wrong side of history about this. And let's be honest about what's really bugging them.
I agree that the facts matter, but I doubt that the National Review dug that far. Nor, as you hint, would it make probably much difference to them if the administration and faculty are in this together, which may well be the case. Thanks for the clarifying point.
Why should DEI “reach out” to someone so obviously acting in bad faith? Gilley is yet another mediocre attention-seeking schmuck who behaves badly and then whines to a well-primed audience on the right about “wokeism” when he gets called out on his bullshit. He’s not a serious person and he doesn’t deserve to be a cause célèbre any more than Matt Walsh does.