“A California history professor who was suspended from his position in 2023 after handing out the Daily Wire’s Jeremy’s Chocolates will return to teaching,” reports The College Fix.
Professor David Richardson was suspended from Madera Community College in May after handing out the conservative brand of chocolates during a campus open house. He was reinstated recently after being found not guilty of Title IX violations.
“I am happy and grateful to be back for all the faculty, staff and students who supported me while I was in exile. I wouldn’t have made it without them. But there is a new normal. I know there were a lot of people on the other side who wanted nothing more than to see me never come back,” Richardson says.
He was placed on administrative leave after a transgender faculty member confronted him over his handing out the chocolate bars.
Jeremy’s Chocolate bars are labeled with the pronouns “He/Him” and “She/Her.” Those with masculine labels have nuts, while those with feminine labels do not. Progressives have criticized the brand as “transphobic” and “anti-LGBTQ.” However, Richardson himself is gay.
“The Title IX complaint against me for including Jeremy’s Chocolates on a table at a college open house was resolved earlier this month. None of the allegations against me were supported and I was found ‘not responsible’ for the entire incident,” Richardson says.
“On January 14, 2024, I was notified that no appeal had been filed and the district was lifting my suspension with no conditions, as I was found ‘not responsible’ for the entire incident. My first day back was Friday, January 15, which was the end of the first week of instruction.”
But even though Richardson is allowed on campus, he will not begin teaching until Feb. 20 due to the college’s slowness in notifying him of its decision.
“Ironically, even though the district had received the final determination before Christmas (it was due to them on December 15, 2023), the classes I was scheduled for were canceled the day before I was notified of the decision (January 6, 2024). So, they had to create a new schedule for me which doesn’t start until February 20, 2024,” Richardson says.
Richardson is among several conservative community college professors in California to recently be disciplined for dissenting against progressive orthodoxy.
In April 2023, tenured history professor Matthew Garrett was fired from California’s Bakersfield College after criticizing the school’s diversity initiatives and other ideologically-tinged initiatives. The vice president of the Kern Community College’s board of trustees, which oversees Bakersfield College, compared Garrett and his ideological allies to livestock that needed to be culled, during a board meeting.
The California Community Colleges have proposed — and partly implemented — speech-chilling DEIA regulations that would enable them to get rid of conservative faculty, by penalizing faculty for not having a woke ideology. The Institute for Free Speech has brought constitutional challenges to these regulations, a portion of which was declared unconstitutional by a magistrate judge in November.
As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes, under these proposed regulations, “Faculty members would, for instance, have to acknowledge the correctness of certain beliefs (e.g., the role of racial and cultural identities in ‘creating structures of oppression and marginalization,’ and the harm caused by one’s ‘internal biases’) and actively promote CCC’s ideological conception of DEIA in their teaching, research and service activities, such as by ‘[d]evelop[ing] and implement[ing] a pedagogy and/or curriculum that promotes a race-conscious and intersectional lens.’
“Diversity” and “inclusion” are not talismans that overcome First Amendment rights. California courts have ruled that government employees usually cannot be punished for disagreeing with their employer’s affirmative-action or “diversity” policy. (See, e.g., Cal. Dept. of Corrections v. State Personnel Bd. (1997)).
Similarly, a federal appeals court ruled that an assistant fire chief in charge of personnel could express opinions at odds with city policy on affirmative action to a minority group, without being fired. (See Meyers v. City of Cincinnati (1991)).
Nor does the Constitution enshrine goals like “diversity” as a job requirement. The Constitution requires only the absence of discrimination in our schools, not “diversity,” affirmative action, or other things that might be seen as promoting “equity.” (See Schuette v. BAMN (2014)).
