A federal judge ruled Friday that Bakersfield College and the Kern Community College District cannot fire tenured history professor Daymon Johnson for criticizing DEI and "cultural Marxism," granting a preliminary injunction that bars the institutions from investigating, disciplining, or terminating him over his political speech.
The ruling is a significant First Amendment win, but it came with a catch. As reported by Just The News, U.S. District Judge Kirk Sherriff held that the college can still require Johnson to complete diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility training "as a requirement to participate on faculty screening committees."
In other words: speak freely, but submit to the training regime if you want a seat at the table.
Sherriff, a Biden nominee, granted Johnson's motion for preliminary injunction on his "as-applied viewpoint discrimination and compelled speech challenges," while also rejecting the defendants' motion to dismiss. The order prohibits the college and district from "investigating, disciplining, or terminating Johnson by enforcing" California code regulations "based on Johnson's proposed social or political speech."
The judge found that Johnson's speech "concerns a matter of public concern" and that it was made in his "capacity as a private citizen or public academic engaging in extracurricular speech." Critically, Sherriff acknowledged that Johnson "has credibly identified specific speech that he reasonably fears would be proscribed by the DEIA regulations."
That's the court conceding what conservatives have argued for years: DEI mandates in public institutions function as speech codes. A professor identified specific things he wanted to say and demonstrated, credibly, that the regulatory framework would punish him for saying them.
The ruling's weakness lies in Sherriff's treatment of mandatory DEIA training. The judge reasoned that Johnson's participation on "an official Bakersfield College committee" would constitute "government speech on an administrative matter in an official capacity," as opposed to "teaching or scholarship in his capacity as a professor." Because the government may express its own views, Sherriff concluded, requiring training as a condition for committee participation does not violate the First Amendment, so long as Johnson is not "required to personally endorse the views expressed in the training."
This distinction is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Anyone who has sat through a DEI training session knows the line between "the government expressing its views" and compelling employees to internalize an ideological framework is razor-thin. The judge acknowledged that the regulations require faculty to "reflect DEIA and anti-racist principles" in their "teaching [and] learning," including in "lectures and classroom discussions." Yet he treated committee participation as a separate domain where the state's ideological preferences can be imposed without constitutional concern.
The Institute for Free Speech, which represents Johnson, framed the broader stakes. IFS Vice President for Litigation Alan Gura put it plainly:
"In America, no one can be required to believe or endorse the state's official political ideology, and everyone is free to criticize it."
That principle won the day on termination. It remains to be seen whether it will eventually prevail on compelled training as well.
Johnson's case did not emerge in a vacuum. The Kern Community College District has a documented track record of targeting faculty who dissent from progressive orthodoxy. Johnson took over as faculty lead of the Renegade Institute for Liberty, or RIFL, from his colleague Matthew Garrett. KCCD tried to fire Garrett for similar speech and ultimately voted to terminate him in a secret board vote. Garrett later secured a $2.4 million settlement with KCCD to end his litigation.
After Johnson assumed the RIFL role, he endured a five-month investigation. He has widely censored himself since, not booking speakers for RIFL events and dropping out of meetings with the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Advisory Committee. The chilling effect was not hypothetical. It was operational.
This is how institutional intimidation works. You don't have to fire someone to silence them. You investigate them for five months. You signal to every other faculty member what happens when you step out of line. One professor gets a $2.4 million settlement. The next one stops booking speakers. The system learns.
The procedural history itself reveals how difficult it is for dissenters to secure relief. Johnson initially secured a preliminary injunction from a magistrate judge, which Sherriff then unexpectedly overruled. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently overruled Sherriff's finding that Johnson had no legal standing to sue, reinstating the lawsuit. Friday's order came seven months after that reinstatement.
Meanwhile, California Community Colleges Chancellor Sonya Christian, the former Bakersfield College president and cofounder of its Social Justice Institute, already got herself dismissed as a defendant for lack of authority to enforce the regulations. Sherriff noted it was "hard to envision" how the case could proceed without a statewide authority, observing that "only a statewide authority could adequately defend the DEIA regulations and the statute." He also found "no basis to believe the Board of Governors would take enforcement action against defendants."
The bureaucratic architecture is elegant in its evasion. The state creates the ideological mandate. The local institution enforces it. When a professor sues, the state says it has no enforcement role, and the local institution says the state made them do it. Sherriff called the defendants' positions "[s]omewhat inconsistently" argued, which is a polite way of describing a shell game.
Johnson's case is part of a broader national fight over whether public institutions can weaponize DEI frameworks against dissenting employees. The dynamics playing out at Bakersfield College are not unique to one community college in California's Central Valley. They reflect the standard enforcement model: adopt vague ideological "competencies," tie them to employment evaluations, and let the implied threat do what an explicit speech ban could never survive in court.
Consider what the regulations require on their face. According to the court's own analysis, they demand that faculty "reflect DEIA and anti-racist principles" in teaching and learning. A professor who believes "anti-racist" pedagogy is intellectually bankrupt, or that DEI represents a form of cultural Marxism, is not merely disagreeing with a policy preference. Under the plain text of these regulations, his professional existence is noncompliant.
Sherriff's ruling offers real protection against the most extreme consequence: termination. That matters. Johnson is up for evaluation again this year, and without this injunction, the regulatory framework gave the college a loaded weapon. Now it doesn't.
But the mandatory training requirement remains. And the message it sends is unmistakable: you may criticize the ideology, but you will still sit through the catechism.
Johnson won the right to keep his job. The fight over whether he can participate fully in his institution without ideological submission is not over.
