To the Trustees of California State University, 

We represent several deeply concerned individuals, and wish to bring to your attention facts pertaining to the proposed ratification of "caste as a protected category" to the collective bargaining agreement, which is on your agenda on Tuesday, January 25th 2022. The resolutions passed by several Cal State bodies up until now all extensively quote multiple news articles, all of which refer to the Cisco Caste discrimination case as the primary example of caste discrimination in California.

We wish to point out that even though the case is sub-judice, all these resolutions treat allegations as facts (Note 1), and none disclose public court documents filed by Cisco Systems, which show many irregularities in the Complaint, which can be seen in the attached public declarations (Note 2):

1) Although John Doe claimed that he was not chosen for a Head of Engineering position due to his caste, he never applied for the Head of Engineering Position in the first place.
2) The primary alleged high-caste "Brahmin" manager, Mr. Iyer, who Doe claims discriminated against him, offered all of his top three Head positions in the group first to Dalit candidates
3) Two Head positions in the group, including the Head of Engineering position that Doe claims he was not chosen for based on his caste, were offered to other Dalit candidates before Doe's complaint
4) Doe claims caste-based salary discrimination as he did not receive a salary increment worth a few thousand dollars, yet Mr. Iyer gave away 100% percent of his equity, worth several millions of dollars, to all of his employees, including generously to Doe (who Mr. Iyer also compensated with several millions of dollars).

Via its court response in Nov 2020, Cisco requested Doe to corroborate his harassment allegations, but Doe still did not provide any specifics (when, where, how, and by who he was discriminated against, etc.), despite seven years in the company. What is worse, Doe's foundational claims are premised on his being in an environment of "entirely upper-caste Indians", which is factually disproved checking LinkedIn data that shows at least seven non-Hindu or non-Indian names in the same Cisco group (Note 3). The academic resolutions also extensively quote the caste survey by Equality Labs (which they themselves have admitted to be unscientific), which was deemed by the trial court judge as not meeting the standard for judicial review. Worse, the survey claims that 1 in 4 Dalits in the United States have faced physical assault from upper caste Hindus when their caste was known, implying that there should be several tens of thousands of police reports, while today there are none that we could find. Additionally, the Equality Labs survey was dismissed categorically by the Carnegie Endowment Survey: Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American attitudes Survey.

Thus, for these reasons, we ask the Board to:

(a) suspend ratification of this resolution as it professes an absolute disdain of academic standards.

(b) await judicial resolution of the caste discrimination case before making any final decisions, similar to what the Santa Clara Human Rights Commission did in 2021 when made aware of the counter-facts to this case

(c) institute an inquiry as to how this resolution reached this far within several California State Universities, without even the slightest of fact checking, or academic objectivity

Regards,

Concerned Well Wishers of the California State University System

Note 1: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1SPkv__aESzMIuP8wPtF9dnW_cIfQI2ESRa7tWR8ilGY/edit

Note 2:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pirioXxzxpYITkzmZZhEXIPgxqgjRQtP/view?usp=sharing​ 

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sun_a23uEcBiXDtwAJJ9aRlUYSpLpY3n4FmkhrCMz8I/edit?usp=sharing 

Note 3: Data available upon request