Civil Rights Complaint Filed After UDC Claims Ideas Are ‘Harmful’ to ‘Marginalized Students’

Yesterday, two nonprofits, Fair for All and Join Our America, filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging the University of the District of Columbia (UDC) violated Title VI and the First Amendment.

On May 21st, 2025, the Our America Foundation reached out to the University of the District of Columbia to host a debate on the topic, “Is The American Dream Alive for Black Americans?” The University responded back with the following response, from Dr. Monique Gamble:

Thank you for considering our great university to expand the reach of your organization’s mission and ideas. However, we are passing on this opportunity. Our university is comprised of many students whose identities actually do put them at risk in a society that has a known history of criminalizing race, gender, sexuality, immigration and socio-economic status. In my view, it’s not enough to be ‘part of the conversation’. These conversations should unequivocally acknowledge the risks that people with marginalized and politicized identities face in their lives daily. At UDC, we do not entertain these realities as debatable.

In this reply, Dr. Gamble, a “political scientist specializing in Black feminism, queer visibility in media, and the intersection of culture and power,” asserts the following claim as indisputable reality: that “people with marginalized and politicized identities” face risks daily because of their identity.

This truth claim is false and employs several insidious rhetorical tactics. 

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Namely, it engages in a form of racial essentialism, where individuals within a particular race are assumed to share a fundamental and immutable experience—always being at risk. Asserting that one, on the basis of anything immutable, is always at risk is bad therapy. Risk is no longer the result of actions engaged in, but an inalienable state. Security—the foundational psychological basis for flourishing—is precluded from such individuals, leaving them adrift in a world of constant danger, to which hypervigilance, on the part of both the students and those entrusted with their care, seems natural. In this framework, discomfort is redefined as harm, and intellectual challenge becomes pathology. But this betrays the very purpose of education. The pursuit of truth—the core activity of the academy—is typically uncomfortable because it requires wading into the unknown. Discomfort in the face of intellectual confrontation is not harm; it is the locus of learning. UDC, and Dr. Gamble in particular, would do well to recover this traditional understanding of academic discourse rather than deny it to students under the guise of protection.

Hence, Dr. Gamble’s extreme safetyism. Harm avoidance is the guiding principle for her administrative decision-making. What Dr. Gamble has deemed harmful are not threats to physical safety, but ideas. Specifically, ideas that would challenge her assertion that her students, because of their identity, are always at risk. 

This tenet of modern “diversity, equity, and inclusion” orthodoxy is the creed by which she governs. Any idea or conversation that does not “unequivocally acknowledge” this central truth—of risk conferred on the basis of identity—is labeled beyond the pale and discriminated against.

Fair for All and Join Our America have alleged that, with this response, UDC has engaged in race-based discrimination, in violation of Title VI, and viewpoint discrimination, in violation of the First Amendment. They are correct on both counts. Dr. Gamble has managed to, on the basis of her students’ identity, deny access to certain ideas and conversations, while simultaneously barring speakers for merely attempting to challenge racial nostrums widely proffered by the academic left.

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Image: “UDC Quad by Matthew Bisanz” on Wikimedia Commons