(LifeSiteNews) – A former tenured history professor at a California community college won a $2.4 million settlement against the institution that fired him for challenging its “social justice dogma.”
Radar Online reported that Matthew Garrett taught at Bakersfield College, where he co-founded Renegade Institute for Liberty (RIL), a group of professors who dissented from the school’s left-wing orthodoxy. Bakersfield fired him in April 2023 based on claims that he and RIL engaged in “unlawful activity against faculty” and “unprofessional conduct” that fostered an “unsafe” environment for minority students.
Among the claims against him were that he allegedly defended racist campus vandalism, held an in-person event in violation of COVID-19 social distancing policies, filed baseless complaints against other faculty members, sent a threatening email to Kern Community College District (KCCD) board president John Corkins, and that RIL made “inflammatory” social media posts about $205,100 spent in the 2021-2022 academic year on the school’s Umoja Community African-American Success through Excellence and Persistence program, which the group likened to “Segregation at Bakersfield College.”
Garrett responded that the anonymously sourced charges are false and unsubstantiated. “If you start to really look at them one by one, they’re really just flimsy sorts of allegations, but it can be overwhelming to someone who doesn’t know the context,” he said. “The idea that they can tamp down discussion by simply labeling things dishonest, unprofessional or immoral in order to circumvent the First Amendment protections and to mischaracterize me as some sort of horrible person is really disturbing.”
“If you read the charges against me, there’s not a whiff of anything about immorality, unless immorality is questioning social justice and the new-age DEI stuff, which I would hope that as academics we could have thoughtful discussion about these things, that we could have disagreed opinions and we could debate and we could have discourse,” he added.
Nevertheless, the KCCD board voted to fire him in a closed-door session, prompting Garrett to respond with a lawsuit that was settled this week with an agreement to pay Garrett more than $2.4 million over the next two decades, which includes back wages and benefits. His complaint records have been amended and sealed as well, and he has agreed to resign from the school.
School officials spun the settlement without admitting fault, claiming the price was worth it just to be rid of the conservative professor. But Garrett told The College Fix it is indeed a victory for free speech on campus.
“After five years of administrative misconduct, a decisive courtroom display exonerated me of all allegations and exposed that Kern Community College District engaged in flagrant retaliation for my questioning of partisan policies and wasteful expenditures,” he said. “Facing an imminent ruling in my favor and the prospect of paying millions of dollars in damages, KCCD had only one viable option: settlement. I am grateful to the many who stood by my side during this difficult time and invite them to join in our triumph.”
“To my colleagues at Bakersfield College and nationwide, I say: Keep the faith; we are winning the battle, one case at a time,” he added.
More than 30 states have introduced legislation eliminating diversity programs from education as part of a broader push against so-called “woke ideology.” Conservatives have long argued that DEI and other forms of identity politics stoke rather than cure division and focus education toward left-wing political indoctrination at the expense of traditional learning.
In May, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.