Republicans are advancing their effort to elevate intellectual diversity by challenging the tenure system for professors.
Lawmakers in several states are looking to undercut left-wing dominance of higher education by regulating tenure, which gives certain professors institutional job security, by requiring professors to be assessed on things like free expression, inquiry, and intellectual diversity.
“Many faculty members have abused their tenure. Faculty members who have become activists instead of scholars and teachers should be appropriately sanctioned,” Adam Kissel, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, told the Washington Examiner. “Many colleges assess faculty members on their commitment to ‘diversity,’ which violates their academic freedom. But assessing them on the likelihood of indoctrinating students or doing their job representing diverse academic arguments, in contrast, measures their ability to advance the institution’s core mission.”
Indiana legislators are sending a bill to Gov. Eric Holcomb’s (R-IN) desk that would force state universities to review a professor’s tenure every five years for “free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.” It would also preclude granting tenure to professors who do not meet academic standards.
The bill would require university boards of trustees, many of whom are appointed by the governor, to define “intellectual diversity” and ultimately determine if faculty members are upholding their academic responsibilities or what sorts of sanctions should be placed on them if they fail to do so.
Schools would need to create a process for denying tenure if “based on past performance or other determination by the board of trustees, the faculty member” is found “unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline” or “likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of 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,” according to the Indiana measure.
Several amendments were recently added to the bill, including protections for faculty members who criticize university leadership.
Tenured professors are notoriously difficult for universities to get rid of, and the professional distinction was originally created to protect the academic freedom of professors from repercussions within their institution and from others. Now, however, the political lean of university professors is so lopsided in one ideological direction that many conservatives see tenure as a way for universities to pad their faculty with professors who undermine the fundamental purpose of academia.
Other states have made efforts to curtail tenure, such as the Georgia Board of Regents approving a measure that makes it easier to punish tenured professors or Florida’s enactment of a post-tenure review.
However, many attempts to undercut the protections have failed. Texas tried and failed to pass a bill to remove tenure as an option for new faculty members but did pass a law making it easier for lawmakers to regulate it in the future.
A new proposal in Nebraska would end tenure protections at all public universities in the state, where the bill’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Loren Lippincott, said getting rid of tenure could help stop the pattern of indoctrinating students with “leftist ideology,” arguing also that tenure helps protect “poorly performing professors.”
Some in academia are concerned with losing the protections.
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New York University professor Ann Marcus, who is the director of the Steinhardt Institute for Higher Education Policy, told the Hill that “the research function of the university really start to vanish” if tenure is regulated.
“I mean, some people say, ‘Just abolish tenure.’ You really lose one of the main purposes of having universities, which is the production of new knowledge, whether it’s a scientific breakthrough or a new understanding of archaeology,” she said.
