• “I can’t help but see this as a purge of any staff who have training in DEI—literally like a McCarthy-era purge—because none of the staff who’ve been fired have any DEI in their portfolio right now,” she said. “All they had is a history of being in a DEI-related position.” —Karma Chávez of the UT Austin AAUP chapter quoted in KUT News on UT Austin’s layoff of sixty former DEI staffers.
• “None of the staff who received pink slips are currently working in DEI-related jobs. These terminations clearly are intended to retaliate against employees because of their previous association with DEI.” —Brian Evans, president of the Texas state AAUP conference, and Texas NAACP president Gary Bledsoe quoted in the Washington Post.
• “If it’s being done through an anonymous complaint process . . . it’s a political hit job and a mockery of academic peer review.” An allegation of plagiarism “needs to be evaluated outside of a right-wing ecosystem that is committed to destroying the careers of Black scholars.”—Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, quoted in Inside Higher Education on the racially charged, anonymous accusations of plagiarism fueling the right’s anti-DEI crusade.
• “The more that higher ed is seen as not being able to police itself and hold itself accountable, the more you will see boards of regents and legislators and Christopher Rufo step in.”—Matthew Boedy, president of the Georgia state conference of the AAUP, quoted in Inside Higher Education reflecting on the firing of Clayton State University’s first Black female provost.
• “There are a lot of people in this state that believe we need to keep moving forward towards diversity, towards justice, towards fairness. And it’s time that the legislature understood that.”—Indiana University–Bloomington AAUP chapter member Russ Skiba quoted on NPR after the passage of Indiana’s “Intellectual Diversity” bill SB 202.
• “You’re trying to demonstrate to the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health or whoever that you have a pipeline of students and that you are training the next generation of scientists from underrepresented minorities. If you don’t have ongoing efforts, you very likely will not have that diverse group of young scientists working in your lab.”—AAUP South Carolina state conference president Carol Harrison quoted in The Post and Courier on state legislators’ efforts to ban DEI in public college and university academic and hiring policies.
• “How can we teach students how to assess or evaluate someone’s arguments without conveying judgments about the merits of those arguments? This is how we teach our students the distinction between opinion and academic inquiry, modeling the use of methodologies that yield some actual intellectual verdicts.”—Afshan Jafar and Simon Feldman of Connecticut College’s AAUP chapter in an op-ed published in Inside Higher Education on the disingenuousness of the “viewpoint diversity” movement.

In solidarity,

Kelly Benjamin
AAUP Media and Communications