Category: Arizona state university
My court fight over DEI at Arizona State isn’t culture-war noise
“Who will rid us of this meddlesome philosopher?”
Arizona State University hopes the Arizona Supreme Court will. I’m confident that my case against required diversity, equity, and inclusion training raises issues far larger than one professor or one ideological program. Fundamental questions about employee rights, public accountability, and the rule of law hang in the balance.
If I succeed in showing that ASU bears legal responsibility — and that employees can hold it accountable — the implications reach far beyond one HR program.
Why would the largest state university in the country defend mandatory DEI training in court? Why would it spend thousands — likely tens of thousands — defending its “inclusive communities” training, a program that teaches employees about the alleged moral and social failures of “whiteness” and “heteronormativity”?
The answer defies common sense. Yet ASU presses forward. In doing so, it has turned what many dismiss as a culture-war skirmish into an employment-rights case with statewide consequences.
Most people hear “DEI” and instantly map the political lines. This case deserves a different reaction. Required ideological training should make any employee — left, right, or indifferent — pay attention.
First, the training relies on racial essentialism. It instructs ASU employees to view themselves and others primarily through skin color, then assigns moral weight and collective guilt on that basis.
Second, it attacks traditional Christian moral teaching, especially marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
Either flaw should have pushed administrators to retire the program long before I raised formal objections.
A third issue should unite every employee, regardless of where they stand on DEI: ASU treated this as an employment matter. The university did not admit error, revise the program, and move on. It hired Perkins Coie to defend racial essentialism. Yes, Perkins Coie — the firm widely associated with the Hillary Clinton-era Steele dossier controversy. ASU employs a full team of in-house attorneys. Why pay a nationally prominent and politically charged firm to defend a training program many already viewed as controversial — and, I argue, unlawful?
ASU’s posture gets stranger. The university has since taken down the required training, yet it continues paying lawyers to defend it in court. When this ends, Arizona lawmakers and taxpayers will want a number: How much did ASU spend on legal fees, and which administrators approved the contracts?
RELATED: Feds probe ASU for racial bias — will other universities be held accountable?
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ASU’s legal strategy aims at dismissal. The university claims I lack standing. Put plainly, ASU argues that an employee cannot hold his public employer accountable for violating state law. At that point, the dispute stops being about DEI and becomes about every employee in Arizona. If ASU wins at the Arizona Supreme Court, employees across the state lose a crucial tool for legal accountability.
Professors to my political left may sneer at my critique of DEI. They should still worry about the precedent.
Imagine a scenario pulled from their nightmares: A future administration takes over ASU and imposes mandatory ideological training from the opposite end of the political spectrum — required ICE-themed training, or MAGA-themed training. If that training violated Arizona law, those same professors would demand the right to sue. ASU’s argument would bar them. This case concerns enforceable employee rights, not just contemporary politics.
ASU’s first bid to dismiss the case failed. A lower court rejected the university’s argument. ASU appealed, and the appellate court sided with the university. That posture put the case on a path to the Arizona Supreme Court.
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Two facts matter here. The Arizona Senate and the state representative who authored the law I claim ASU violated have filed an amicus brief supporting my position. Their message is simple: A public employee has standing to hold a public employer accountable for breaking the law. The statute prohibits the kind of racial blame and collective guilt that ASU’s training promoted. The principle should not require explanation: Don’t assign moral fault to entire groups based on skin color.
So why does ASU defend this?
Because ASU does not view this fight as one training module that can be swapped out and forgotten. Race-based blame sits near the center of the contemporary left’s approach to education. If I succeed in showing that ASU bears legal responsibility — and that employees can hold it accountable — the implications reach far beyond one HR program. ASU’s initiatives aimed at combatting “whiteness” would come under scrutiny. Its embedded social justice goals face legal challenge and public examination. Students could follow with suits over race blame in a “decolonized curriculum.”
“Who will rid us of this meddlesome philosopher?” ASU really hopes the Arizona Supreme Court will.
Every employee in Arizona should watch what happens next. The outcome will determine whether public institutions answer to the law — or whether employees must comply silently, no matter what ideology administrators impose from above.
From accommodation to absurdity on campus
Last week, Arizona State University’s provost sent faculty another familiar message ahead of the spring semester: Ensure all digital course materials meet accessibility standards. After 25 years teaching philosophy at ASU, I’m well aware of the institution’s growth and its long-standing commitment to accessibility. That commitment, in itself, is not controversial.
But recent data should give universities serious pause.
A society can medicalize despair, bureaucratize despair, and accommodate despair. None of that answers the question despair is asking.
Two reports — one from the Harvard Crimson and another from the Atlantic — put numbers to what many faculty have observed for years. At Harvard, 21% of undergraduates received disability accommodations in 2024, up from roughly 3% a decade earlier. The Crimson notes that Harvard is now aligned with a national average hovering around 20%.
The Atlantic goes further, describing what it calls an “age of accommodation” at elite schools. At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of students are registered as disabled. At Amherst, the figure reaches 34%. The most common accommodation, professors report, is extra time on exams.
When disability becomes elastic
To be clear, accommodations for genuine physical disabilities are not in dispute. A wheelchair ramp is not a moral scandal. A student with a real impairment should not be excluded from education. That principle remains sound.
What has changed is the nature of disability itself.
Both articles describe a shift away from visible, physical impairments toward diagnoses that are invisible, elastic, and difficult to distinguish from ordinary hardship in a competitive academic environment. ADHD, anxiety, and depression now dominate accommodation requests, treated as qualifying disabilities under the Americans with Disabilities Act framework. The Crimson ties much of this surge to the COVID era, quoting one professor who described the pandemic as a “mass disabling event.”
That explanation may be partly true. Many students are not gaming the system; they are shaped by it. But even granting that, the trend raises three problems universities can no longer dodge.
The fairness and standards problems
First is fairness. When extra time becomes widespread — especially among high-performing, well-resourced students — faculty are right to wonder whether accommodations are providing access or advantage.
The Crimson acknowledges faculty suspicion that accommodations are used to “eke out advantages.” The Atlantic warns that a system designed to level the playing field can begin to distort the very meaning of fairness.
Second is standards. If a significant share of students receive individualized modifications — extra time, deadline extensions, alternate testing environments — then faculty must ask an uncomfortable question administrators prefer to avoid: Is the course still the same course?
Exams exist to measure knowledge and skill under shared constraints. Remove those constraints for many students, and results no longer mean the same thing. At best, the system becomes two-track. At worst, rigor is quietly redefined as cruelty and education collapses into credentialing.
The deeper crisis
Third — and most important — is meaning.
If vast numbers of young adults now pass through education labeled as anxious and depressed, and if that diagnosis becomes the gateway to academic survival, we should ask what kind of culture we have built. What account of life, purpose, and human flourishing are students receiving in K-12 and college?
For years, students have been immersed in a worldview that frames them primarily as victims — of structures, systems, identities, and histories beyond their control. They are told meaning is socially constructed, morality is relative, and human beings are little more than biological accidents shaped by power. Hardship, in this framework, becomes pathology. Suffering becomes injustice. Endurance becomes oppression.
At that point, anxiety and depression cease to be merely medical categories. They become rational responses to a life stripped of purpose.
Education with meaning
Here the philosopher cannot remain silent. A society can medicalize despair, bureaucratize despair, and accommodate despair. None of that answers the question despair is asking.
Have we taught students how to face difficulty? To endure frustration? To pursue excellence despite pain? Or have we trained them to interpret hardship as harm — and then rewarded that interpretation with institutional permission slips?
The philosopher Westley (disguised as the Dread Pirate Roberts) said, “Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.” But there is suffering, and there is suffering well to attain what is good. We stopped teaching this, and the young adults are experiencing the consequences.
RELATED: Christian students are pushing back — and universities are cracking
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Universities love to talk about “student success.” But education is not merely success. It is formation. And formation requires truth: truth about what a human being is, what suffering is for, what excellence demands, and what life ultimately aims at.
When universities exile God, moral realism, and any shared account of human purpose, they should not be surprised when students seek refuge in medicalized identities that turn pain into paperwork.
This crisis is not simply about abuse of accommodations or even about mental health statistics. It is about whether higher education can still tell students the truth: that limits are not always oppression, that hardship is not always injustice, that discipline precedes freedom, and that meaning is discovered, not administered.
If universities cannot say why education aims at the highest good, then they should not be shocked when students conclude it means nothing — and despair follows.
It is time to return education to what it was meant to be: the formation of souls ordered toward wisdom and virtue.
