College Trustee’s Anti-Conservative Comments Will ‘Figure Prominently’ in First Amendment Case, Attorney Says

A screenshot from the video of the Dec. 13, 2022 meeting of the KCCD Board of Trustees. Screenshot via YouTube/Kern Community College District Board of Trustees

After a college board vice president quipped about getting rid of conservative faculty members, the attorney representing two history professors said he expects these “ugly comments” to “figure prominently” in a First Amendment lawsuit.

Vice president of Kern Community College District (KCCD) Board of Trustees John Corkins made comments against conservative faculty members at a board meeting on Dec. 13, 2022.

In the meeting, he said there were “about 5 percent that we [the administrators] have to continue to cull.”

“Got ’em in my livestock operation, and that’s why we put a rope on some of ’em and take ’em to the slaughterhouse,” Corkins continued, while Trustee Nan Gomez-Heitzeberg, a retired 30-year administrator at Bakersfield College (BC), guffawed.

“We are going to get bad actors out of the room; it just bothers me ... the bad actors are paid staff and faculty,” said Corkins. “It’s hard to get rid of them.”

He made the comments after an unfruitful settlement conference regarding the First Amendment case. The case was originally against KCCD general counsel Christopher Hine and then-Chancellor Thomas Burke. An amended complaint was filed last summer swapping in the new chancellor, Sonya Christian.

The attorney of the case is Arthur I. Willner. The two plaintiffs are history professors Matthew Garrett and Erin Miller of BC, a campus of KCCD.

After learning of Corkins’s remarks, Willner immediately contacted the attorneys representing the district, demanding a formal public apology from the board and from Chancellor Sonya Christian, who “remained shamelessly silent” during Corkins’s speech, Willner said.

“No apology has been forthcoming; nor do we expect one,” Willner told The Epoch Times on Jan. 2 in an email.

Garrett and Miller are listed as “Committed Faculty” of a conservative group called The Renegade Institute for Liberty at Bakersfield College. The two of them have been disciplined for two years following an investigation by Hine and Burke. The investigation concluded that the two professors were making defamatory statements about two other professors related to the funding of “social justice” initiatives.

During the public comments portion of the Dec. 13 meeting, a representative of the Dolores Huerta Foundation accused the Institute of “posting hate speech, threatening groups of color, and intimidating students and staff.”

“Free speech is not hate speech, we all know that,” the representative added, and demanded that the board act to remove the professors involved.

BC professor Paula Parks, founder of the African American club Umoja, said the club was touted by a member of the Institute as not allowing white students in.

“These are lies and misinformation, designed to create a hateful, toxic, unsafe environment,” she said during the public comments.

Parks didn’t confirm in her comments whether Umoja allows white students or has any white students as members.

Corkins made his remarks in response to these public comments.

“Although Trustee Corkins openly admitted that he had only heard one side of the story, he nonetheless proceeded to characterize my clients as ‘bad actors,’” Willner stated.

Willner said this is “outrageous.”

“This represented yet another (indeed the ugliest) example of the KCCD administration’s pattern of retaliating against faculty members—specifically my clients—who express views that are at odds with the prevailing political orthodoxy on campus,” Willner added. “I expect that Trustee Corkins’s ugly comments will figure prominently in the case.”