It's your move, Chancellor Wilcox

On December 11th, an op ed appeared in the Wall Street Journal titled "UC Riverside’s DEI Guardians Came After Me: The university censured me after I spoke out against race taking over the faculty hiring process."* The author was Professor-Emeritus Perry Link, identified by UC-Riverside as a Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines, Ph.D. in East Asian Languages & Civilizations, Harvard University, 1976.** 

Prof. Link was recently the subject of a lengthy and lauditory article in the UCR Magazine which details his expertise in Chinese affairs and how he has been barred from China for his work on behalf of a Chinese dissident scholar.***

The Wall St. Journal op ed opens with: Kim Wilcox, chancellor at University of California, Riverside, wrote me a letter of censure on Aug. 16. I was, in the administration’s view, guilty of “discrimination” against “individuals seeking employment.” I had made “unwarranted comments” about race. Mr. Wilcox based his claim largely on the following statement, which I had written to colleagues on a faculty search committee in December 2022: “[Candidate X] is lively and charming—and yes, Black, which is great—but I can’t say that I found his sophistication and experience up to the level of our top candidates.” I expressed my worry that some of my colleagues would, as they had in the past, make the applicant’s race their “overriding criterion.”

It then goes on to describe various procedures and tribunals that became involved and the intervention of the chancellor. It closes with: 

As Mr. Wilcox was contemplating his final decision on my case, I offered to visit his office to hear face-to-face his decision and reasoning. He didn’t answer. A few months later I got a message from university counsel warning that all of what happened to me is confidential and that my writing about it “may result in discipline.”

By publishing his op ed, it appears that Prof. Link has now written about what happened, despite the warning. So now Chancellor Wilcox, who is due to retire at the end of the academic year, has to respond - or not. His choice. But if he doesn't respond, Prof. Link's version of the events he describes stands as the public record.

It's your move, Chancellor Wilcox.

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*https://www.wsj.com/opinion/uc-riversides-dei-guardians-came-after-me-39d8e26e.

**https://complitlang.ucr.edu/people/faculty/link/.

***https://news.ucr.edu/ucr-magazine/winter-2024/the-accidental-dissident. The article begins: “Blacklisted by the Chinese Community Party” is a badge of honor Perry Link has worn for almost 30 years. On any night, Link, a UCR professor of comparative literature, may be heard on Voice of America or quoted in The New York Times. He’s a leading voice on the human rights violations of the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP. But reducing his role to that of a commentator on the CCP and the dissidence it has inspired does Link an injustice. He played a pro-democracy role in a significant episode of Chinese history, the spring 1989 Tiananmen Square tragedy. In a series of events that could be storyboards in an espionage thriller, Link helped in the escape of the communist party’s “public enemy No. 1,” the dissident Fang Lizhi. In Link’s telling, he never intended any of it — he is an accidental dissident...