Beginning this summer, faculty members at Indiana’s public colleges will be evaluated on whether they’re espousing “intellectual diversity” in the classroom. That’s the result of a law signed last week by Gov. Eric J. Holcomb, a Republican, over widespread faculty opposition.
The law, introduced in the state Senate by Spencer Deery, a Republican, lets public colleges’ boards deny faculty members tenure or promotion if they are deemed “unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution” or to expose students to scholarship representing a variety of ideological viewpoints, or if the boards determine that the faculty members are likely “to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated” to their discipline.
The law also creates a mechanism by which students and employees can submit complaints against faculty and staff members they believe aren’t adequately promoting intellectual diversity, which it defines as “multiple, divergent, and varied scholarly perspectives on an extensive range of public-policy issues.” Those complaints are to be turned over to human-resources professionals and, “in limited circumstances,” to the state higher-education commission, a leader of that body told the Indiana Capital Chronicle.
But beyond that, specifics of how “intellectual diversity” will be judged are not clear. That ambiguity, coupled with the law’s provisions — including requirements that faculty members undergo post-tenure reviews with the same criteria every five years — has also raised fears of intrusion into academic freedom and the risks of unintended consequences.
That’s one reason Rep. Vernon G. Smith, a Democrat who’s also a professor of education at Indiana University Northwest, opposes the law. “I don’t know how you would even begin to monitor that,” Smith told The Chronicle. “You almost have to have a recording of the class in session.” Nor have any constituents contacted him to advocate for the law. Among his faculty colleagues, he said, “I don’t think there’s any effort aimed at indoctrinating students.”
Deery did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In a written statement, he said that the bill’s signing is “a strong signal that our state is committed to academic freedom, free expression, and intellectual diversity for all students and faculty.”
The practicalities of enforcing the law raise a host of questions and concerns, according to academic-freedom experts interviewed by The Chronicle. To adjudicate whether sufficiently diverse perspectives were on offer, “you would have to have some set of criteria or a checklist that would determine whether or not a particular faculty lived up to the mark,” said Stanley Fish, a professor in residence at New College of Florida who has written on academic-freedom issues for The Chronicle.
The contents of that checklist are likely to vary widely between courses and disciplines, said Keith E. Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University and founding chair of the Academic Committee of the Academic Freedom Alliance. Intellectual diversity in a political-science course would be construed differently than in a biology course; the same, he said, is true of a survey course as opposed to an upper-level seminar. “It leaves everybody kind of at sea as to, How would you translate this legislative directive into something that’s going to be sensible in an academic environment?” Whittington said.
That uncertainty, he predicted, could prompt a kind of pre-approval process by which faculty members submit their syllabi for vetting by administrators. Even though such a process would constitute “a genuine intrusion into academic freedom,” Whittington said, “I think a lot of faculty are going to want it just because that’s the only way they’re going to feel at all confident that they’ve met the standard, [that] they’re not going to get in trouble at some point down the road.”
In the meantime, Whittington, who has written about academic freedom for The Chronicle, suspects instructors will probably try to cover their bases by “shoehorning” a range of readings into their syllabi. That could make courses less “intellectually coherent,” particularly if a professor doesn’t normally teach a given perspective or isn’t as familiar with it, he added.
And while the law directs faculty members to “expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks,” it doesn’t specify what form that exposure must take, in what context, or how thorough it should be. For example, it’s not clear whether competing viewpoints must be given equal weight in readings, discussions, or assignments, even if the scholarly consensus leans markedly in one direction.
That exposure could lead in a different direction than the one Whittington said the bill’s proponents probably intended. Faculty members who do not normally teach critical race theory, for instance, might think they need to do so to satisfy the intellectual-diversity standard. Students, too, could push their professors to include more left-leaning perspectives in class, while administrators would set a priority on minimizing complaints filed through the new system the law establishes.
In that way, Whittington said, Indiana’s law differs from other legislation that addresses “divisive concepts.” Rather than declare particular subjects off limits, the new law is written to expand the scope of views included in a given course. Such an approach could make legal challenges to Indiana’s law more difficult, he said, and it’s possible lawmakers hoped it would fare better in the court of public opinion, too. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they also thought this would go over better with faculty,” he said. “You’re not telling them to stop teaching things. You’re telling them just to add new things to the toolbox.”
‘A Political Demand’
But faculty leaders at many of Indiana’s public universities came out forcefully against the measure before Holcomb signed it. Ball State University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, for instance, said that it would contravene the national AAUP’s 1915 statement, which safeguards instructors’ “freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extramural utterance and action.” The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the American Historical Association, and the Modern Language Association, among others, also expressed opposition on academic-freedom grounds.
They’re right to do so, Fish said. “The idea of intellectual diversity as a requirement is a nonstarter because it’s always a demand from the outside, and therefore a political demand, that instructors organize their courses in a certain way.” It should be up to professors, he said, to determine based on their expertise which perspectives are introduced in class.
The term “intellectual diversity” itself carries a political valence, Fish said. It was introduced by the conservative activist David Horowitz “in the context of a complaint that faculties were made up of a disproportionate number of progressives rather than conservatives,” he said. “Even though that may in many departments be a fact, it’s not a fact that has any relationship to educational or pedagogical goals.”
