I think universities have a serious “intellectual diversity” problem, but a bill introduced in the Indiana state legislature is not a good approach to trying to address that problem and would create significant academic freedom problems. You can find my opinion on this issue here.
Indiana Senate Bill 202 is discussed here. The state senator sponsoring the bill is a former aide to Mitch Daniels when Daniels was president of Purdue University. He hopes the bill will help change perceptions of American higher education among conservatives, but I’m skeptical that this bill will do much to help change those perceptions and I don’t think it would make much progress in addressing concerns of the conservatives. The text of the bill can be found here.
The bill (ch. 2, sec. 1(b)(1)) directs regents to develop a policy to block the tenure of professors who are “unlikely to promote a culture of free inquiry.” I think this is actually quite interesting and raises difficult questions. However, I am not keen on trying to do this through council policy. Under this rule, could universities hire a professor who subscribed to various postmodern views on free speech or agreed with Marcuse on the need for “repressive tolerance”? Could universities hire professors with diverse views derived from critical race theory on the need to suppress certain ideas in the public sphere and at universities in particular? Could universities hire conservative faculty who agree with Christopher Rufo and others about the need to weed out campus radicals and do without what they might call luxury disciplines like women’s studies? Maybe not. There are classic problems regarding the need to tolerate the intolerant, and universities must resist being captured by those who are hostile to their fundamental mission of free inquiry and the neutral pursuit of truth and the advancement of knowledge. But this type of blanket ban is unlikely to have any positive effects.
Much more serious is the century. 1(b)(2) which would block tenure of those unlikely to expose students to works from “a variety of political or ideological frameworks.”
Section 1. (a) This section applies to an institution that grants tenure or promotion to faculty members.
(b) Each governing board of an institution shall establish a policy that provides that a faculty member may not be granted tenure or promotion by the institution if, based on past performance or other determination by of the Board of Directors, the faculty member is:
(1) is unlikely to promote a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution;
(2) are unlikely to expose students to scholarly work from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline; OR
(3) is likely, in the course of performing teaching or tutoring duties within the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction .
What counts as “variety”? Why is it necessary for individual professors to provide this variety? I can teach a course on “originalism and its criticisms,” but I can’t teach a course on “originalism?” Do I get “variety” in my originalism course if I teach Rappaport, Baude, Barnett, Balkin, and Whittington? Presumably not, but why exactly and who decides?
Section 1(b)(3) prohibits subjecting students to political opinions in teaching that are unrelated to course subjects. Overall, good. But the risks and severe penalties could end up hindering teaching.
Section 2(a) would incorporate the same into a system of five-yearly post-tenure reviews. Section 2(c) would protect “expression of dissent” or criticism of the administration or outside political activity from retaliation during post-tenure review, which is interesting. I’m not sure this is the best place to provide that type of protection and it may not be very effective at doing the job.
It is not surprising that sec. 4 would create a system to accommodate student complaints about faculty performance on this “intellectual diversity” requirement. Systems of surveillance of classroom speech by university administrators that exploit student complaints are a sure path to chilling free inquiry in the classroom and punishing professors who become controversial or disruptive to the administration.
The bill has other aspects related to diversity statements and institutional neutrality, which I think are mostly positive, but I won’t go into detail here. As written in the bill, the entire process could be done entirely within the board of trustees, without involving any faculty or administration. Probably not how it would work in practice, but not how you would want to structure such a process.
I appreciate the instinct here, but this is not the way. It will encourage political witch hunts against teachers and invite inappropriate intervention by administrators in teaching in unwarranted ways. Section 1(b)(2) is a big problem and further difficulties arise from it. Intellectual diversity on campus will not be achieved through mandates to faculty on how to teach their classes. Ultimately, free inquiry will depend on the composition and professional norms of the faculty.