California Polytechnic State University has announced they might remove a 25-year-old Chick-fil-A from campus over the chain’s strong Christian values.
According to a report from San Francisco Gate, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has announced that they are considering removing Chick-fil-A from campus after the university’s faculty committee criticized the chain’s strong Christian values. The committee specifically referenced Chick-fil-A’s donations to groups that are perceived by some to be anti-LGBT.
“We don’t sell pornography in the bookstore and we don’t have a Hooters on campus — we already pre-select those kind of things based on our existing values,” academic senate Vice Chair Thomas Gutierrez said in a comment to the student newspaper. “This is a similar thing, the difference is we’re actually profiting from this. So our money, every dollar a student is spending at Chick-fil-A, is going to these causes that are in violation of our values.”
In a surprising pushback against the faculty vote, university spokesperson Matt Lazier said in a statement that the university believes in providing a space for viewpoints and ideologies unpopular with progressive faculty members.
“While university administration passionately disagrees with the values of some of the organizations the president of Chick-fil-A has chosen to make personal donations to, we do not believe in responding to intolerance with intolerance,” Lazier said. “Rather, we must model our values of inclusion – that means upholding the rights of others to have different perspectives and ensuring there is space in our community for differing viewpoints and ideologies, even those that may be in direct conflict with our own.”
The administration is now tasked with deciding whether or not they will follow the recommendation of the faculty committee.
Breitbart News reported in March 2019 that a dean at Rider University had resigned from her position in protest of the administration’s decision to ban Chick-Fil-A from campus. The administration announced that they had banned the fast-food chain over student concerns about the chain’s strong Christian values.