Anyone with a web browser and an email account can file a complaint, and the research material is usually on the university’s own website, where they cluelessly brag about their illegal programs. Often, higher education people seem generally amazed that race or sex discrimination – so long as it’s performed on behalf of fashionable groups – is nonetheless illegal. It’s important for them to be reminded that the law does not comport with modern woke ideas on race and gender. It’s also the case that the investigations themselves are a deterrent. They involve paperwork, hassle, and risk for the institutions involved and the personnel who run them. As the left likes to say, “the process is the punishment.” Leftist advocacy groups are happy to exploit that fact. Why let them have all the fun?
Nor is Perry’s approach the only way to go. Students and faculty can also complain directly to their own university’s DEI departments. Such complaints have to be addressed, and retaliation against the complainants is illegal. University of Houston Prof. Adam Ellwanger is encouraging people to do this, and notes: “Your school’s DEI Office is the best weapon you have: you are a protected class. Don’t allow the Left to wield DEI unopposed. Conservative students should begin filing complaints for speech that attacks their identity categories—especially when it comes from a professor. DEI is required to investigate actionable complaints.”
It takes very little pushback to make a difference, because the campus orthodoxy is such that many people who engage in fashionably approved racial or sexual misconduct don’t even think they’re doing anything wrong. The prospect of consequences for this misbehavior is likely to be sobering, and the point that such behavior is illegal and improper will stick.
[Glenn has a new Substack platform for his longer-form essays. Be sure to check it out. – Ed]
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