A former community college Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) director and tenured faculty member is suing her former employer for allegedly stunting her free speech and academic freedom, telling Newsweek: "They literally marginalized me as an individual."
Tabia Lee, who is Black, was recently terminated from her position at De Anza Community College, located in Cupertino, California, as a full-time, tenured member after working in the education field for approximately two decades.
A 53-page lawsuit filed July 10 claims that she encountered a hostile department "illegally targeting White people on the basis of race." It also says she was accused of "whitesplaining" and not being the "right kind of Black person," and claims she was vilified for refraining from invoking racial stereotypes and refusing to use the term "Latinx" instead of "Latinos."
DEI, which broadly describes initiatives designed to promote the fair inclusion of under-represented groups, is almost everywhere in current U.S. society, including in congressional amendments for military-related funding and across the business sector.
Questions remain about DEI's effectiveness and popularity, however. Only approximately three in 10 workers value a diverse workplace, and only about 30 percent of American employers have a staff member who promotes DEI, according to the Pew Research Center.
In March of this year, Lee was informed by De Anza that she would be terminated "because of De Anza and the District's ideological opposition to Dr. Lee's humanism in the classroom," according to the complaint. It says that she "refused to knuckle under to campus orthodoxy," which Lee has described as excessively "woke."
"She happens to be Black, but first and foremost, Dr. Lee is a teacher dedicated to humanism and civil rights," the complaint continues. "She teaches that people should not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. De Anza is hostile to this concept." It says Lee's thinking was opposed to "unchangeable attributes ascribed by characteristics of race and gender beloved by De Anza's race and gender ideologues."
Lee is determined to fight for what she sees as fundamental tenets of education, she told Newsweek.
"These are people who should definitely know better," Lee said in a phone interview. "And the way that they behaved was what they claim other people do to marginalized people. They literally marginalized me as an individual, and they shunned me and they worked really hard to push me out."
She is currently without a job and wants her old position back, plus benefits and other financial damages incurred.
"Foothill-De Anza Community College District has an obligation to protect privacy in personnel matters," a spokesperson for the college told Newsweek via email. "Without commenting on any specific matter, we can share that faculty members have comprehensive due process and appeal rights both under the law and negotiated through their bargaining unit."
A 'Troublesome Habit of Thinking Rationally'
Lee, who is from Sacramento, has a sociology background and has instructed students of different age levels at multiple institutions.
She said she was originally hired by De Anza in August 2021 and had aspirations to retire there, but soon found out the situation was "hostile."
Lee, whose name and work have been erased from De Anza's website, told Newsweek that what she encountered there was something she never previously experienced—including a constant "focus on whiteness" and "white supremacy culture," which she said was weaponized against her and other faculty members as part of the chilling of free speech and academic freedom.
The lawsuit says that she "objected to racial stereotypes peddled by Defendants that targeted both White and Black Americans, bizarrely celebrating Blacks as incapable of objectivity, individualism, efficiency, progress, and other grossly demeaning stereotypes, while condemning Whites for promoting these same values, which Defendants label 'colonialism' and 'White supremacy.'"
One alleged instance resulted in Lee being called "a dirty Zionist" for having certain speakers on campus, which reverberated up to the college's Board of Trustees.
"I was elevating the wrong people," others allegedly said, according to Lee. "They called and referred to Jewish people as white oppressors. I had brought speakers into the campus to do antisemitism education and Jewish inclusion education, based on community members coming directly to us and saying they had concerns about our Jewish students at our school."
Michael Allen, one of Lee's attorneys in this case, told Newsweek via phone that his firm only represents faculty and students against universities. He referred to the Lee case as "a natural fit."
"[Lee] had this troublesome habit of thinking rationally, which they really don't like at De Anza College," Allen said.
He said that while many community colleges provide courses for individuals to get their GEDs, in fields like nursing or in the trades, De Anza made it seem like the faculty's "sole purpose was to train revolutionary social activists or something."
That included forcing faculty members to make "land acknowledgments" recognizing Native American tribes in a manner that is not historically or anthropologically accurate, or forcing the declaration of pronouns without providing choice.
Leigh Ann O'Neill is the managing director of legal advocacy for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), a nonpartisan organization dedicated to civil rights and liberties.
She has known Lee for about 18 months, and said that education is supposed to be about understanding different viewpoints and forging a meaningful path forward.
"What we've observed is that in different ways her speech was censored or chilled," O'Neill told Newsweek via phone. "And if it had been the same type of speech from somebody else, that might not have happened.
"So, there's this really disturbing interplay that takes place between the First Amendment rights and then how discrimination laws are impacted when an institution that's as powerful as the employer doesn't like the particular content of one's speech—and that's what we saw in her case."
Support from Educators Nationwide
In Lee's case, her criticism against the tenets of social justice and its ties to identity-based power dynamics—as she wrote in an essay published in Compact earlier this year—was deemed antithetical to the traditional role DEI instructors and directors typically play, at least at De Anza.
"It is very unusual," Allen said. "Very often people who are hired in that capacity lead the charge to suppress academic freedom and free inquiry on campus when people object to their orthodoxy. Here, they hired someone who really was teaching from a civil rights perspective.
"And really, this is a very simple issue: Tabia Lee was promoting civil and human rights. In other words, that all people should be treated equally."
O'Neill called De Anza's alleged thwarting of Lee's academic freedom "particularly daunting" due to institutions of higher education being able to control who and what is taught.
"That limits the ability of students to learn and shuts out diverging viewpoints," she said. "You can only describe that as antithetical to education."
Lee said she has heard from countless individuals since her story first spread in the spring, including mentors at De Anza in addition to tenured and non-tenured faculty members from both public and private institutions nationwide.
She found that no matter the tenure or the institution, her situation is "not unique" to De Anza and that a slew of educators is opposing the same orthodoxy infiltrating schools across the spectrum. She said environments of critical thinking should be the last place this occurs.
"[De Anza] couldn't silence me through any legitimate means or objectively based means around my real performance, so they really subverted this process to silence the emergent work that I was starting to do...I'm just one person but I try to write back to each of them and to encourage them because you can't give up," Lee said through tears.
She added: "We're interconnected whether we like it or not, and we need to work together; we need to talk together. It doesn't mean we need to agree and have rainbows from the sky. But we just have to be able to coexist with one another and to be able to listen to someone who has a different perspective and to still work with that person."
Update, 7/18/23, 11:45 a.m. ET: This article was updated with additional information.
