A California professor was censured by his chancellor after criticizing a black candidate who had applied for a job at the University of California, Riverside, according to an op-ed the scholar recently published about his experience.
The Dec. 11 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, “UC Riverside’s DEI Guardians Came After Me: The university censured me after I spoke out against race taking over the faculty hiring process,” details the experience from the point of view of Perry Link, a comparative literature professor at UCR.
The op-ed’s bio lists Link, 79, as an emeritus, which means he may have recently retired or is only teaching part-time. He could not immediately be reached for comment by The College Fix.
“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,” Link wrote.
“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 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has published the reprimand letter.
“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,” Link wrote in his op-ed. “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.”
According to Link, the discrimination accusation was unfair: “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.”
He added his reasonings for the critique were sound: “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 professor then detailed the investigative process he underwent between February and April 2024 after he was accused by a dean of breaching confidentiality rules and making adverse and unwarranted comments about the race of the candidate.
Four days of hearings “had all the fixtures of a trial—prosecutor, briefs, swearings-in, witnesses, cross-examinations and more,” Link wrote. In June, a jury of his peers concluded that Link no longer serve on search committees but determined his actions “did not violate the Faculty Code of Conduct.”
“…Wilcox disagreed with the committee’s conclusion on the racial charges and sent me a letter of censure.”
Link is a fighter, however:
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.”
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