During the height of DEI mandates across California’s college campuses, most faculty who disagreed stayed quiet. One professor in Bakersfield, however, refused.
Known more for oil fields and agriculture than free speech fights, Bakersfield College became the unlikely site of a post-DEI legal win when history professor Daymon Johnson sued the school and Kern Community College District officials in 2023.
“We were seeking $17.91 symbolically, which is the year the First Amendment was passed,” Johnson told IW Features, recalling the start of his legal battle.
Johnson has taught history at Bakersfield College since 1993. He is a founding member and Faculty Lead of the Renegade Institute for Liberty (RIFL), a small group of faculty dedicated to open inquiry and viewpoints the campus treats as radioactive.
He started seeing colleagues face backlash for their views earlier than most people realize.
Between 2019 and 2021, Johnson and other RIFL members began drawing complaints for ordinary political speech. One incident that later proved central to his case came after Johnson reposted a Facebook post by fellow Bakersfield College professor Andrew Bond.
“Maybe Trump’s comment about sh**hole countries was a statement of projection because honestly, the US is a f***ing piece of s**t nation. Go ahead and quote me, conservatives. This country has yet to live up to the ideals of its founding documents,” the post by Bond stated, according to the lawsuit.
Johnson shared Bond’s post and asked readers whether they agreed with the “radical SJW from BC’s English Department.” Bond then filed an administrative complaint against him.
An investigator was then brought in. But the real escalation, however, came when Johnson’s colleague and RIFL predecessor, Matthew Garrett, started taking the blame.
Administrators piled charge after charge onto Garrett, Johnson said.
“They actually cut off his pay, and they threw the refrigerator at him – just multiple charge after charge after charge,” Johnson told IW Features.
“One of the early documents when they attempted to fire him said, ‘We don’t have to prove all of these. We just have to prove one, and if we can prove one, these are all fireable offenses.’ Several of those were not things Matt did, but that I had done on our Facebook page,” Johnson added.
Two of those charges stood out. One involved the phrase “Cultural Marxism,” which administrators treated as racist and fireable.
The other was Johnson’s public criticism of a Cesar Chavez Leadership Certificate that required no writing or graded academic work, only field trips. He called it a “participation trophy.” That criticism was also later pinned on Garrett.
By late 2022 the pressure had moved from individual complaints to open institutional threats. On Dec. 8 that year, then-Bakersfield President Zav Dadabhoy sent a campus-wide email invoking California’s DEI regulations. Dadabhoy declared the college would not allow the “discontent or views of a few” to interfere with its mandate to “intentionally practice… anti-racism.”
“We must not allow the discontent or views of a few to supersede what we are required to provide at our college and the work that we have intentionally developed to support all members of the community. This is a reminder that we are all tasked with this work,” Dadabhoy wrote.
Four days later, at a Kern Community College District board meeting, Trustee John Corkins went further. Corkins described RIFL faculty as part of “that five percent that we have to continue to cull,” comparing them to livestock that needed a rope and a trip to the slaughterhouse.
No one on the board objected.
Ultimately, Bakersfield succeeded in ousting Garrett, firing him over a speech that Johnson said he had written.
That was when he contacted the Institute for Free Speech, which took the case pro bono.
“They weren’t in it for the money. I wasn’t in it for the money,” Johnson said.
Their goal wasn’t just to secure justice for Garrett or himself, but to ultimately stop California from enforcing its unconstitutional DEI mandates at all.
Johnson’s lawsuit was filed in June 2023 as a pre-enforcement challenge. The professor and his team argued that California’s education code and community college regulations required faculty to demonstrate, promote, and be evaluated on DEI and “anti-racist” principles. Johnson had refused those regulations.
What followed was a three-year legal fight. A district judge initially sided with him. Another later ruled he lacked standing.
By late fall 2025, the case reached the 9th Circuit. Roughly seven months later, on Feb. 20, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction and found Johnson was likely to win on the merits.
“I view all this as an ideology. It’s not about diversity as such. I’m for diversity in a broad, general sense,” Johnson said. “But the neo-Marxist use of those terms, I oppose that ideology, its connection to identity politics. Its use of cloaking affirmative action.”
Johnson rejected the idea that Bakersfield College is systemically racist—a claim that DEI often inherently breeds. The professor pointed to the school’s efforts to have minority applicants from across the country, noting he himself is half Chinese and raised in the East Bakersfield barrio.
Only after the 9th Circuit’s injunction did the college move to settle. And while most faculty still stayed quiet out of fear of retaliation, Johnson chose not to.
Part of the reason, he said, was timing. At 63-years-old, he was near the end of his career. Younger professors with children and mortgages could not take the same risk.
“I’m in a fortunate position because I’m later in my career. I can retire anytime if I had wanted to, versus younger faculty that have families or children,” Johnson said. “That’s a lot more difficult for them.”
In July 2026, the college officially settled. The agreement converted the preliminary injunction into a five-year permanent order barring officials from investigating, disciplining, or terminating Johnson for his speech in the classroom, in his scholarship, or as a private citizen.
What the win actually gave him, Johnson said, was the chance to do the job he signed up for.
“I can finally get back to focusing on what I’ve always cared about – teaching history and engaging in the free exchange of ideas,” Johnson said in July.
