Professors slam Dem governor candidates’ racism accusations in USC debate fiasco

Professors have accused California Democrats of chilling academic freedoms and engaging in unfounded racial identity politics after the University of Southern California’s last-minute cancellation of a gubernatorial debate that didn’t include low-polling candidates of color.

Four of race’s lowest-polling Democrats, who all are candidates of color, complained about being excluded from the debate.

“There is real racial bias in this world. There is real cases of discrimination in this world,” Jarred Cuellar, an assistant professor at Cal Poly Pomona, told The Post after four non-white candidates complained of being excluded from the debate.

“It does a disservice to real claims of racial bias out there, and it seems more like they didn’t like the outcome.”

The debate was scheduled to feature only six candidates — two Republicans and three Democrats who were polling at the top, as well as Democrat San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. The excluded candidates alleged racial bias in the decision to move forward with an all-white debate stage. Other leaders, such as top Democrats in the state legislature, also put on pressure.

The outrage put USC professor Christian Grose in the spotlight, as he came up with the formula of candidate viability based on polling and fundraising.

Around 50 academics came to his defense in a letter sent to the USC’s president, stating that the formula was independently formed, peer-reviewed and academically sound.

Grose said that state Democrats muzzled free academic speech by calling for the debate to be axed.

“I do think that this has a chilling effect on academia, because that public education part — people like me are not going to want to do this in the future,” he told Politico. “That political objective has now been achieved, to chill academics doing anything besides reading their books and writing articles.”

The debate should have gone on, multiple professors said, to give Californians information they need to cast an informed vote. Morris Levy, an associate professor at USC, called the candidates’ claims of racism “preposterous.”

“They made insinuations that were on the conspiratorial side,” Levy said. “They are irresponsible and that they reflect quite poorly on those candidates, even though, in the end, I guess they got their way.”

The incident showed that Democrats are no better than the Trump administration they’ve attacked for putting pressure on universities, Cuellar added.

“We’re at an era where people are already kind of — it seems like we’ve seen loss in trust and expertise in universities, and that’s typically been attributed to the right, which we see now is it’s not the case,” he said.

USC President Beong-Soo Kim insisted political pressure played no factor in the decision to cancel the debate.

“I want to make it very clear that my decision was not in any way influenced by those demands or threats,” he told the Daily Trojan.

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