Banning Chick-fil-A restaurants or their famous chicken sandwiches is apparently en vogue at universities in the United States. Trinity University, a private Christian university in San Antonio, Texas, rejected a student resolution to ban Chick-fil-A food from its dining hall. Johns Hopkins University students once protested the proposal that Chick-fil-A could be located on the campus.
This time, faculty members at California Polytechnic State University passed a faculty senate resolution proposing a ban on Chick-fil-A at their university. The restaurant has been in the city for at least twenty-five years and last year signed a five-year renewal contract with the university. Cal-Poly, as it is known to students, faculty, and alumni, is located in San Luis Obispo, California.
The reasoning behind the proposed ban is that the restaurant allegedly funds anti-LGBT groups. Faculty senate vice chair Thomas Gutierrez, who also works as a professor at Cal-Poly, compared Chick-fil-A to pornography and Hooter’s. He said, “We don’t sell pornography in the bookstore and we don’t have a Hooters on campus – we already pre-select those kinds of things based on our existing values.” He continued and said that the university is profiting off of Chick-fil-A and therefore, Cal-Poly dollars are “going to these causes that are in violation of our values.”
Chick-fil-a’s statement about its charitable donations through its foundation is that they continue to be “committed to youth and education.” The statement continued, “The Foundation’s giving helps the economic mobility of young people by focusing on homelessness and poverty, education, and community revitalization, and is done with no political or social agenda. The narrative that our giving was done to support a political or non-inclusive agenda is inaccurate and misleading.”
Cal-Poly spokesman Matt Lazier reiterated that it is the right for faculty members to object and raise their opinions on issues, but by removing Chick-fil-A from its campus would constitute censorship.
