A University of California professor running for Congress is focusing his campaign on “discriminatory” diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at California’s colleges and universities, which he says have “exacerbated racial discrimination and undermined the values of merit and freedom of speech.”

David Pan, a professor of German studies at the University of California, Irvine, has announced his bid for California’s 46th congressional district. Spurring his campaign as a Republican is a recent public comment he made to the Regents of the University of California detailing his experience with his university’s DEI bureaucracy. 

In the public hearing of the California regents meeting, Mr. Pan asked the university administrators to consider “eliminating the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion mandates at the UC campuses. … These mandates have exacerbated racial discrimination and undermined the values of merit and freedom of speech in the entire UC system,” he stated. 

“I was recently connected with a search committee in which we had three shortlisted candidates,” he continued. “The equity adviser as a condition of allowing our search to continue insisted that we include another candidate from farther down the list, who was either Black, Hispanic, or a woman.“

In his statement to the committee, Mr. Pan added that the hiring process he witnessed was “clearly discriminatory and undermines the principle of academic excellence and merit. In addition, because these policies have been instituted through offices of inclusion and equity advisers, there’s no way for faculty to protest against these policies.”

His statement was met with silence from the crowd attending the public regents meeting. As he spoke, attendees could be seen watching Mr. Pan with faces of shock and bemusement. One attendant watching the speaker turns around to another attendant behind her, her mouth agape in an expression of shock.

In a follow-up statement posted on Linkedin, Mr. Pan added that his experience has “become standard practice” at the public university system. He elaborates: “Such practices are imbedded in administrative structures such as ‘offices of inclusive excellence,’ and they are ideologically enforced through required diversity statements both in hiring and in merit reviews.”

After providing the public an account of his experience with DEI, he announced that he would be running for Congress in the 46th district, which represents much of Anaheim and Santa Ana in Southern California and is majority Hispanic. The seat is occupied by a Democrat, Lou Correa, who has been representing the district since 2017. Mr. Correa is seeking re-election in 2024.  Mr. Pan would be the first Republican since 2013 to represent the area. 

In an interview with the Sun, Mr. Pan explains how the DEI bureaucracy has been subverting education in the humanities, and leading to extremism among student views on campus. 

Mr. Pan says that “standards have been undermined on his campus through the manipulation of the hiring process.” The “focus on bringing in certain groups of ethnic minorities has affected the content of what is being taught in the classrooms,” he added. When asked to elaborate, he explains how, in the humanities, there has been less European studies, such as his own field of German studies, and “more hiring in the ethnic studies fields.” 

Mr. Pan’s decision to run for Congress is an attempt in part to expose what he sees as DEI’s pernicious impact on college campuses, even beyond the hiring process. He states that there has been a “privileging of certain viewpoints through diversity statements.”

Those opposed to these statements, he notes, are “dinged” through the process. The result, he says, is that “diversity policies which have institutionalized political perspectives have turned universities into monolithic places.” He points to statistics showing progressives outnumbering conservatives on University of California campuses by between eight and 20 to one. 

When asked about the broader implications, Mr. Pan points to the extremist, leftist beliefs espoused by many students on campus.

Initiatives to “privilege certain groups with fellowships, mentoring because these groups have been victimized in the past” have resulted in a de-emphasis of  “achievements.” Identity, he says, has trumped achievement. Students, he says, “support Hamas simply because they belong to a group which has been victimized. … Their actions are not being judged, only their background.”

Mr. Pan elaborates on how his criticism of DEI plays into a broader political campaign. In a district that some would say is a majority beneficent of affirmative action, that is, majority Latino, Mr. Pan says that “in knocking door-to-door,” he has “witnessed constituents of all backgrounds” who are receptive to his points on key issues, such as education reform. 

Regardless of their backgrounds, he notes, many residents took issue with the quality of the school systems serving areas in which they live. Mr. Pan says he believes that the public teacher union, itself a key supporter of DEI and ethnic studies in the state, needs to be overthrown. Mr. Pan argues in favor of a voucher system that would give parents access to better-quality schools.