Anthony Kern Willing to Harm AZ University System to Boost His Congressional Bid to Replace Debbie Lesko

The traitor insurrectionist State Senator Anthony Kern is trying to boost his profile in his race for the nomination to AZ’s Congressional District 8 by attacking Arizona’s ASU and our state’s remaining support for higher education.

Kern is threatening to ‘gut’ state support for the university system based on a mere allegation of political retaliation in the firing of an ASU-affiliated bureaucrat making over $300K a year.

The AZ Cap Times covered the contract issue leading to the over-payed bureaucrat’s termination:

In February, ASU’s T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development at the Barrett, The Honors College put on an event entitled “Health, Wealth and Happiness,” featuring remarks from Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and Dennis Prager, founder of PragerU.  

Ahead of the event, 37 out of the 40 faculty at the honors college sent a letter to Barrett Dean Tara Williams condemning Kirk and Prager. Kirk and Prager spoke as planned.  

But in April, Tom Lewis, the namesake donor of the T.W. Lewis Center, terminated his donation, and the center and center director Ann Atkinson’s job as a result. Atkinson claimed her firing stemmed from censorship on campus. And Linda Blake, former event operations manager at ASU Gammage, claimed she was fired in retaliation for helping coordinate the event.

…

Brett Johnson, attorney with Snell & Wilmer, who assisted ASU in preparing the internal report, spoke to the committee today. Johnson acknowledged there were “communication breakdowns” on ASU’s behalf. 

But he clarified Atkinson was terminated because her salary, which totaled $314,000, was contingent on Lewis’s continued $400,000 donation. Johnson added the programming and classes, which previously operated under the T.W. Lewis Center, have continued. 

Kiera Riley Arizona Capitol Times//November 27, 2023

What Kern carried away from the termination of a contract employee funded by a donation is ammunition for his partisan war on education. CapTimes reports that “Lawmakers ended the [investigating committee’s] meeting with Sen. Sonny Borrelli, R-Lake Havasu City, noting a goal to “gut” university funding. Kern joined and said, “I think there’s an appetite for that, and now, we’re going to capitalize on that appetite for the next session.””

Kern’s going to ‘capitalize’ on a ginned-up controversy to attack our university system and ‘gut’ state support for our higher-education students? Disgusting.

Arizona Agenda covered the ‘controversy‘, ably debunking the committee’s nonsense attack on ASU, noting: “All of which leads us to today’s hearing, where lawmakers called ASU staff “Gestapo,” repeatedly derided Crow as an ivory tower elitist who thinks he’s smarter than the Founding Fathers, and spent an awful lot of time fixating on the university’s LGBTQ class offerings.”

AZCentral, as usual, presented a master class on how NOT to cover radicals posing as Republicans by uncritically leading their coverage with all the buzz-word-laden coverage of the AZGOP’s unhinged assertions uncritically for the first half of the story.

Is an opportunist ideologue like Kern really who the AZGOP wants in Congress? Not content with being a traitorous insurrectionist who tried and failed to wreck and subvert our democratic elections, Kern is now on the warpath against our higher education system, the economic lifeblood of our state’s economy to advance his treasonous career.