Dr. Tabia Lee, who was employed as director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) by De Anza College in California in August 2021, was laid off by the tenure review committee on March 7.
Lee told NTD, a sister media of The Epoch Times, “I was labeled, and I was bullied and harassed just for doing the job that I was hired to do.”
She said she was called by one of the staff members “white speaking, white splaining” and “supporting white supremacy.”
“Disagreements like this were instant,” Lee said.
This happened within two weeks after Lee started the role as director.
Lee said that she grew up in Lodi, California, with neo-Nazis or KKK members around, and that she knows exactly what actual white supremacists are.
“As a black woman, no one’s ever in my life told me that I’m a white supremacist,” Lee said. “And the way that landed on me, I felt very bad.”
Lee could not help but think, “Who would call me a white supremacist? And where does that come from? What’s it rooted in?”
Just days after the essay was published, the tenure review committee voted not to re-employ Lee as a contract employee for the next academic year.
When she worked together with staff members in the Office of Equity, Social Justice & Multicultural Education, Lee felt she was “the odd person out, because I wasn’t thinking that way.”
After being described as “supporting white supremacy,” Lee noticed that a slide kept being put up over and over again. A low-resolution image of the slide provided by Lee showed a graph that lists 15 behaviors and characteristics deemed to be white supremacy culture.
“It had things like being on time, being objective, the written word, all of these other characteristics that you generally would associate with being successful or being in the academic world, or that I had seen as that but they were calling it white supremacy culture,” Lee said.
When Lee tried to put together different race ideologies and present them to students in early 2023, it made the tenure review committee angry, according to Lee.
Lee wanted the students to look at their curriculum through those lenses and identify what philosophies are at work, but the review committee said she was “leading people to danger,” Lee said. She said her presentation was “deemed deeply offensive once again.”
Another thing that she said was deemed offensive was that she compared anti-racist activist Ibram X. Kendi’s work with the theory of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) in a Venn diagram, and she guided students to see the differences and similarities between them.
Lee said that she said to panels during the interview process for the DEI director position, “I try to create spaces of dialogue, of inquiry, where we can all learn from each other, where even if we have different political or social ideas, we can come together and identify points of commonality.”
The Event With Alicia Garza
Lee also described in detail how she was accused of being disrespectful to Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza.In October 2021, Lee was involved with an event that was held online on Zoom with Garza.
“Before I came, the college had purchased, like, hundreds of copies of Alicia Garza’s book, ‘The Purpose of Power,’ and the whole campus read the book—teachers, students, staff, everyone could get a copy if [they] would like a copy. So when I came, one of the first tasks that my tenure review committee gave me was to organize a fireside chat with Miss Garza.”
Lee organized hundreds of students to participate in the event and prepare questions for it, all in less than two weeks. Even though she was new to the school, did not know many staff, and had never met the students, she reached out to everyone and organized a group for the event.
She mainly reached out to students who had read Garza’s book.
“So luckily, and thankfully, my colleagues sent me students. And then I started meeting with them, and we developed questions. They were very excited,” said Lee.
She described how the students were eager to ask questions of Garza, and after they came up with many questions, they ranked them in order of importance by voting on them.
However, the day before the event, Lee’s supervising dean told her that according to Garza’s staff the students could only ask questions that were approved by Garza’s management and were written down and prepared.
Lee asked her dean for the speaking engagement contract. She was told a contract was not available, but the students just could not ask questions outside the approved ones.
“So I took it back to the students. They were heartbroken. They said, ‘So basically, you’re asking us, you’re telling us that we’re going to go and do this list that you’re giving us, and now we can’t ask any of our questions,’” she said.
Lee tried to soften the blow to her students by telling them there is an image Garza’s team needs to protect and they would not want some inappropriate comment to go viral on the internet, but it did not work. The students said they would not be at the event under such circumstances, and they all planned to pull out of the event.
After some discussion, Lee and her students came up with a strategy designed to please both sides. The students would ask the prepared questions, and then they would add follow-up questions that were off the script.
“And they were good questions. They were not disrespectful or anything strange or anything like that. They were just genuine questions that students had, like, ‘What inspired you to write the book?’ Things of that nature. It was very neutral; it was nothing troublesome.”
“We had the event. It was wonderful. If you were on the outside, watching those hundreds of people there, it looked great; it flowed well; the students did amazing. But what they did was they asked their questions as follow-ups,” she said.
During the event, Garza looked upset and at some point turned off her camera during the off-script questions, Lee said. At that time, Lee typed to the students, telling them to go back to the scripted questions.
“It was very respectful. It was very good. But [Garza] was visibly uncomfortable. And so that was then parlayed into me disrespecting her, according to one of my tenure review members,” Lee said.
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Lee finally obtained the speaking engagement contract between Garza and De Anza College.
“That’s how I found out how much she was paid, which was an exorbitant amount for a Zoom chat, especially a performance of prescriptive questions. And then I found out that there was nothing in there that said that the questions the students made could not be asked. It wasn’t in the contract,” said Lee.
She said one of the “main attackers” on her work through the tenure process was an evaluator who invited her informally to join a socialist network. Lee said she didn’t express an interest in joining the network.
“I am surprised and disappointed at how much they were able to subvert what is supposed to be a fair, transparent, and constructive evaluative process,” she said.
Lee said she hasn’t yet ruled out taking legal action against De Anza College.
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