Students and Professors in Alabama Launch Lawsuit to Fight Ban on DEI Policies
“The state legislative body has no right to censor and vilify these important and legitimate topics in our classrooms”

The left knows that losing DEI represents a loss of power for them. That’s what this is really about.
Campus Reform reports:
Alabama professors and students sue to overturn anti-DEI state law
A group of students and professors at public universities in Alabama recently filed a federal lawsuit against the state’s anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) legislation that was passed in 2024.
The pro-DEI complaint was filed in the Northern District of Alabama on Jan. 14.
The plaintiffs include Cassandra Simon, Dana Patton, and Richard Fording, all of whom are professors at the University of Alabama. The plaintiffs also include three students from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, according to the Tuscaloosa News.
The lawsuit challenges the constitutionality of the state’s recent anti-DEI law, S.B. 129.
“These universities have also restricted funding for affinity-based and social justice focused student groups, and dismantled spaces assigned to student organizations that were intended to serve Black and LGBTQIA students,” the lawsuit states about the effects of the bill’s passage.
Professor Simon issued a lengthy statement for the Legal Defense Fund to express why she took part in the lawsuit that seeks to reimplement DEI policies and programs at public universities throughout the state.
“SB 129 is among the most egregious infringements on the rights of students to receive the quality of education they deserve,” Simon wrote. “Inclusive curriculum and campus spaces are undeniably a strength in higher education, and, as a professor, I’ve witnessed how teaching and engaging with some of these so-called ‘divisive concepts’ can be transformative for both professors and students.”
“The state legislative body has no right to censor and vilify these important and legitimate topics in our classrooms,” Simon continued. “If this discriminatory legislation is allowed to continue, elected officials—with no expertise in matters of higher education—will become emboldened to further impose their viewpoints on the university communities.”

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Comments
Just as the right to chicken done right, espoused by Colonel Sanders more years ago than I can remember is a nice talking point and no more, so is the “right” to receive “quality education.”. It most certainly is not a constitutional right.
Whether a “quality education” is a constitutional right depends on which state you’re in. In some states it is a constitutional right, and the question then becomes who decides what that means.
For instance while this professor says “Inclusive curriculum and campus spaces are undeniably a strength in higher education”, I deny it quite easily and think that an education that doesn’t include those things is of higher quality than one that does.
The wording seems a bit hysterical. I hope these people aren’t professors of law!
Social Work (Cassandra Simon) and Political Science (Dana Patton and Richard Fording).
“The state legislative body has no right to censor and vilify these important and legitimate topics in our classrooms”
They do if they pay for your flyers and bullhorns.
It’s not that simple. It is unconstitutional for governments to cut someone’s previously allocated funding, or to refuse to allocate funding that they would otherwise have done, as a punishment for exercising a constitutional right.
For instance, see Brooklyn Museum v Giuliani, or whatever the case title was. The Brooklyn Museum displayed some art works that NYC didn’t like, so the city cut its funding; the museum successfully sued to get the funding restored, because the motive for the cut was so obviously these displays.
The other side of this is that the state legislature can say the only reason we have a university in the first place is to produce productive, patriotic, taxpaying citizens, and if it’s not going to do that then there’s no point in its existing in the first place, so we certainly don’t want to pay for it.
Not sure why they think this is some kind of constitutional issue–the state doesn’t have to pay for this, and if it is harmful, why can’t they prohibit it? I am utterly amazed at what passes for legal analysis these days
This handful of liberals are not normal Alabamians.
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