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Calif. professor fired after criticizing college’s woke DEI protocols, now he’s a millionaire

August 13, 2024 | | Print Article

A conservative professor has won a $2.4 million settlement from a California college that retaliated against him for complaining about its leftism.

Matthew Garrett, a former tenured history professor at Bakersfield College, sued the school in 2021 after it retaliated against him for complaining about his colleagues wasting their grant money on leftist causes.

In response, interim School Board President Zav Dadabhoy penned a 19-page report accusing Garrett of an abundance of unprofessional conduct.

“The report allege[d] Garrett defended vandalism on campus by the Hundred Handers, described as a white supremacist group by the Anti-Defamation League; publicly accused colleagues of using grant funds to advance a partisan agenda; held an in-person event against COVID-19 protocols on Sept. 8, 2021; filed 36 ‘baseless’ complaints against colleagues that resulted in 23 third-party investigations; and sent a threatening email to Trustee John Corkins claiming to possess documents that showed ‘past indiscretions,’ among other accusations,” according to Insider Higher Education.

“Through his constant barrage of hostile comments—which intimidate and humiliate his colleagues and the district’s students—Garrett demonstrated an inability to adhere to professional standards in the workplace,” Dadabhoy wrote in the report.

In a statement to Campus Reform, Garrett pushed back on the accusations.

“If you start to really look at them [the accusations] 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,” he added.

He also slammed the idea that he’d said or done anything immoral.

“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 a thoughtful discussion about these things, that we could have disagreed opinions and we could debate and we could have discourse,” he said.

Despite his rebuttals, the trick by Dadabhoy worked and the board voted to fire Garrett last year.

The settlement, reached recently, says he must resign from the college, but only once the college pays him out a whopping $2.4 million, in addition to $154,520 in back wages and medical benefits.

“The district will also withdraw and seal all of its 2023 charges against Garrett, as well as any earlier documents that imply misconduct,” according to Inside Higher Ed. “The settlement says the agreement isn’t ‘an admission of any wrongdoing or liability by either the District or Garrett.'”

Garrett said in an email that the school agreed to pay out so much money in order to avoid paying even higher costs if it outright lost the suit in court.

“KCCD believes the settlement is in the best interest of the District and allows us to focus on the future and continue to deliver quality higher education for students of Kern County without any further legal distractions,” a school spokesperson told Campus Reform.

“To be clear, the dispute with Matthew Garrett was a disciplinary matter due to his disruptive actions on campus, none of which concerned freedom of speech,” they added.

Garrett meanwhile had some positive words of encouragement for those among his former colleagues who are fighting the same battle.

“To my colleagues at Bakersfield College and nationwide, I say: Keep the faith; we are winning the battle, one case at a time,” he said.

Vivek Saxena
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