SAM DINGMAN: Back in 2024, ASU philosophy professor Owen Anderson filed a lawsuit against the Arizona Board of Regents, over what he said was a university-mandated DEI training. He alleged that the training — which was called “Inclusive Communities,” and discussed subjects like white privilege and transformative justice — imposed a worldview based on definitions of race, and was therefore unconstitutional.
An ASU spokesman at the time denied that the training was a requirement, and Anderson’s lawsuit was eventually dismissed by the Arizona Court of Appeals.
But now, he and his attorneys at the Goldwater Institute are asking the state Supreme Court to allow the lawsuit to proceed. And in light of the ongoing debate about the role of DEI in academia, we were curious to learn more about professor Anderson’s objections. I spoke with him here in our studios recently, and he told me that he has no problem with the individual components of DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — in theory. But, he said …
OWEN ANDERSON: They’re used in order to teach the Marxist dialectic of oppressor versus oppressed. That society is divided into those two groups, and then you can identify those groups based on skin color, which is definitely one of the views out there, but it’s not the only way to interpret history or society. And so it shouldn’t be given a privileged position in the university as the only view that’s taught…