Cleveland State fires controversial professor as Ohio State still pushes mandatory DEI coursework
As a court backed Cleveland State University’s decision to fire a professor for making controversial statements, Ohio State University still requires its students to complete diversity, equity and inclusion coursework for their degrees.
A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Nov. 4 that CSU didn’t violate the First Amendment rights of Professor Bryan Pesta, whom it fired in 2022 for publishing a controversial academic work related to the correlation between race and intelligence.
Pesta claimed CSU fired him because he said genetics played at least some role in the intelligence gaps between Black and White people, The College Fix reported. However, the university said that it fired him after the National Institutes of Health sanctioned him for uploading data to an unapproved server in the Netherlands.
People who investigated him claimed that they did not treat Pesta differently because of his views. However, some researchers who reported the professor said that they “combed” through his data after reading his papers to find problems, so that he could be fired for his beliefs.
According to The College Fix, Liam O’Brien, then a Kent State University political science graduate student and now a doctoral candidate, was upset by Pesta’s article. So, as The Chronicle of Higher Education reported, he “did what came naturally, talking to students and professors about Pesta’s article, and trying to get him censured,” going as far as organizing a campaign because he didn’t like Pesta’s publication.
University of California, Los Angeles researcher Kent Taylor supported O’Brien’s efforts by sending emails to “the NIH, Cleveland State, and the University of Minnesota, alerting them to the article,” according to The Chronicle.
Ohio State Maintains DEI Courses
Meanwhile, the Ohio State University still requires its students to pass DEI courses, despite being prohibited by law.
Defending Education, an education watchdog group, urged Ohio’s Attorney General Dave Yost to investigate the university for allegedly violating a new state law banning mandatory DEI efforts in public colleges and universities.
In its letter, the group stated that OSU’s “Race, Ethnicity, and Gender Diversity” coursework requirement goes against Senate Bill 1, the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act.
The bill, signed into law earlier this year, prohibits “any orientation or training course regarding diversity, equity and inclusion” at public universities unless the state chancellor grants an exception.
According to the bill, state institutions also may not “encourage, discourage, require or forbid students, faculty or administrators to endorse, assent to or publicly express a given ideology, political stance or view of a social policy, nor will the institution require students to do any of those things to obtain an undergraduate or post-graduate degree.”
OSU’s general education curriculum, launched in 2022, requires all students to complete courses in seven “foundational” areas, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender Diversity.
“Our letter showed that the Ohio State student registration portal still lists one course in ‘Race, Ethnicity and Gender Diversity’ as required as a Foundation in General Education,” Reagan Dugan, project manager for Higher Education at Defending Education, told The Fix. “We believe this DEI requirement in General Education clearly violates this prohibition.”
Benjamin Johnson, OSU assistant vice president for media and public relations, told the news source that the university is “aware of the letter,” adding that the officials are “in contact with the Attorney General” and that OSU is “in compliance with Senate Bill 1.”
