In what has to be one of the most bizarre comparisons I’ve ever come across, a faculty chair at a university in California likened the 25-year-old Chick-fil-A on campus to selling pornography in the school’s bookstore.
The faculty senate of Cal Poly San Luis Obispo voted overwhelmingly to kick Chick-fil-A off campus, citing the fast-food chain’s support of “anti-LGBT causes,” referring to the donations CEO Dan Cathy has made to various nonprofit, faith-based organizations, according to The San Francisco Chronicle.
Thomas Gutierrez, vice chair of the college’s academic senate, told the on-campus newspaper Mustang News, “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.”
“This is a similar thing,” he continued. “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.”
The overwhelming majority of faculty senate members — 38 out of 44 — voted to remove Chick-fil-A from the California campus. However, the university has no plans to kick Chick-fil-A out, at least not for a few years.
In a statement to KSBY-TV, university spokesman Matt Lazier said there has never once been a complaint or concern of discriminatory action in the quarter century Chick-fil-A has been at Cal Poly. He did, though, note the school “disagree[s] passionately with the ideologies of some of the organizations to which the president of Chick-fil-A has chosen to make personal donations.”
“However, university administration’s disagreement with the political views of a given business owner does not give the university license to effectively censor that business and prohibit it from continuing to operate at the university,” he said.
Lazier also went on to note how very popular Chick-fil-A is on the campus, which is no surprise, given it just became the No. 3 biggest seller in the quick-service market, falling behind only McDonald’s and Starbucks.
He also made clear the university — despite the exclusionary vote by the faculty members — does not “believe in responding to intolerance with intolerance.”
“Rather,” the spokesman said, “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 university, it should be noted, signed a five-year contract extension with Chick-fil-A in 2018. So it’s safe to say America’s favorite fast-food restaurant will probably be around campus for at least a few more years.