A new law will tie tenure at Indiana’s public colleges and universities to whether professors can promote intellectual diversity, free inquiry, and free expression within their classrooms.
The law received Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb’s signature on Wednesday after passing the Republican-dominated state Legislature. It is designed to shift the focus of higher education’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts from creating a workforce of diverse races, genders, and sexualities to seeking a diversity of ideas and perspectives.
Under the law, which takes effect this July, faculty members at Indiana’s seven public colleges may be denied tenure if they are deemed unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry or expose their students to “multiple, divergent, and varied scholarly perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.”
Specifically, each college’s board of trustees will establish a “diversity committee” to determine what intellectual diversity means in individual faculty members’ disciplines, whether those faculty members have delivered it, and what kind of penalty they should face if they fail to do that.
This committee will also review intellectual diversity complaints against faculty members. The law allows students to file complaints about professors who don’t present a variety of relevant political or ideological frameworks, as well as those who use teaching hours to offer political or ideological opinions and that are unrelated to their academic disciplines.
Professors will be subjected to post-tenure reviews, conducted on a five-year basis along similar criteria.
Mr. Holcomb said the law will “ensure freedom of expression for students and faculty” at our publicly funded institutions.
“The bill requires free inquiry and civil discourse programming for new students, strongly encourages academic freedom, and protects faculty to express differing viewpoints from their colleagues and university leadership,” the governor’s office said in a statement.
“Indiana just sent a strong signal that our state is committed to academic freedom, free expression, and intellectual diversity for all students and faculty,” Mr. Deery said in a statement following the signing of his bill. “Universities that fail to foster intellectually diverse communities that challenge both teachers and learners fail to reach their potential.”
The bill has drawn criticism from several academic organizations.
The American Historical Association, the national group of historians, wrote in a letter to Mr. Holocomb that the bill “inserts the will and judgment of politically appointed boards of trustees into the fundamental work of university faculty.” It also argued that the bill sets arbitrary standards and would “create conditions of uncertainty for faculty.”
“Where is the line?” the group asked in the Feb. 20 letter. “Must a history course on the Holocaust assign texts by Holocaust deniers?”
In March, the American Political Science Association similarly called the law a threat to academic freedom.
“Placing the authority of post-tenure review in the hands of a board of trustees leaves the stability and advancement of faculty careers up to the ideological whims of the board rather than academic merit,” the organization said.
Meanwhile, Purdue University, which hosts over 2,000 faculty and staff across five schools, said the new law won’t affect it much since it is already a “bastion of individual freedom to doubt, debate, and dissent.”
“Unlike many other institutions that headed down convenient yet slippery slopes in recent years and months, this university has not been in, and will not get into, the business of censoring controversial speech, chilling unfashionable viewpoints, canceling campus events, suspending faculty or fellows, or issuing endless institutional public statements on social-political issues,” the university wrote in a statement last month.
“This university resolutely stands for freedom of speech and academic freedom, and always will.”
