Last year, Indiana enacted a law requiring public colleges to set up a complaints system that students could use to report professors who fail to “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity,” among other things. The legislation touched off fears about whether it would, paradoxically, hinder academic freedom and freedom of speech.
Some effects are now coming into focus. Less than two dozen complaints were submitted at public, four-year colleges under the law in the six months after it took effect on July 1, according to records obtained by The Chronicle. Ball State University topped the list with 11 complaints. All Indiana University campuses received a total of 9 complaints. Indiana State University received one. The University of Southern Indiana, Vincennes University, and all Purdue University campuses received zero complaints.
Public Law 113, also known as Senate Enrolled Act 202, required public colleges to report to the Indiana Commission for Higher Education by April 1 the total number of complaints submitted during the previous calendar year, categorized by the nature of the complaint. Those reports, which The Chronicle obtained through open-records requests, also had to explain the system a college uses to accept complaints and summarize how it notifies campus community members on how to submit one.
At Indiana University, the nine complaints described eight unique events at four campuses. Eight complaints were related to political speech in the classroom and one was related to “a failure to consider alternative viewpoints on a non-political matter.” Indiana University also reported that 37 “frivolous complaints” were submitted anonymously “as a form of protest.” An example of a typical “frivolous” complaint, the report said, is “Professor xxxx studies the black female experience and is an award-winning teacher and prolific publisher.” The university did not count “frivolous” complaints in its official tally.
Complaints related to SEA 202 comprised 6 percent of all complaints submitted to Indiana University from July 1 until the end of last year through its reporting mechanism EthicsPoint, which fields all types of complaints, like research or financial misconduct. The report did not mention how many total complaints were submitted to EthicsPoint between July 1 and December 31, 2024.
At Ball State, two complaints concerned “classroom dialogue” and one concerned course materials. Eight complaints were filed by students against other students. Indiana State’s one complaint concerned a faculty member who “failed to adequately perform their academic duties and obligations.”
I have an ethical obligation to speak my conscience when it comes to issues that are germane to what I teach.
Although the law has solicited a small number of complaints, some professors say it has created a chilling effect on their speech in the classroom. Since July, some professors have reported altering assignments and feeling reluctant to teach current events. One professor told The Chronicle that students felt to him like “potential police officers,” and he decided to forego class discussion during a unit on Palestinian protest songs to avoid receiving complaints. Four professors have joined a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union arguing that the law violates their First and 14th Amendment rights. The attorney general of Indiana and the counsel for the defendants are awaiting a judge’s decision on a motion to dismiss the case for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction.
Benjamin Robinson, an associate professor of Germanic studies at Indiana University at Bloomington, is currently under investigation for an alleged SEA 202 violation. An anonymous student alleges that Robinson has “repeatedly spoken out against Indiana University” and has used class time to talk about his arrests and “say that the university is restricting peoples free speech,” according to the complaint. Robinson was arrested last year during an encampment on Dunn Meadow, a 20-acre lawn that’s a well-known site for protests. He was also arrested during a protest at the Israeli Consulate in Chicago in 2023.
Robinson acknowledges that the events described in the complaint happened during his class “Introduction to German Thought and Culture,” but he does not consider them to be violations of SEA 202, which he finds unconstitutional and a “direct attack on academic freedom and free speech.”
To him, teaching does not just include content but also pedagogical style. Pedagogy relies on ethos — the integrity of the speaker, he said. “When you teach, you want to say and bring in certain things that might not be directly related to the content of the course but to the social context of learning and to the speaker — you might want to bring that to bear in the class.” His course concerns the philosophy of freedom and the public use of reason, and he thinks his discussion of the Israel-Hamas war and his participation in the Dunn Meadow protests are related to those ideas. “I have an ethical obligation to speak my conscience when it comes to issues that are germane to what I teach.”
SEA 202 prohibits professors from subjecting students to “political or ideological views and opinions” unrelated to a professor’s course or discipline. To Robinson, that can be hard to define. “How do I understand what counts as bias, what counts as pedagogy, what counts as content, and what counts as extraneous? None of these things are clearly set up by the law.”
Beyond the merits of the complaint, he also takes issue with the procedure that categorized the complaint as an SEA 202 violation. A student originally submitted the complaint through a bias-incident report, which was then forwarded to the university compliance office and filed as a “Classroom Climate” issue through the SEA 202 reporting mechanism, according to the complaint.
The submission details matter to Robinson because SEA 202 violations can lead to a formal investigation and are considered during a professor’s post-tenure review. Indiana University’s bias-response team, according to its website, does not “take disciplinary action, conduct formal investigations, or impinge on free speech rights and academic freedom.” “These are very frightening times when administrators can decide that they’re going to up what’s tantamount to a complaint on a professor’s evaluation to a whole investigation that can include getting me fired,” Robinson said. Indiana University at Bloomington did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
The Commission for Higher Education will release its own report on SEA 202 complaints by July 1, which will include the total number of complaints categorized by description at Ball State University, Indiana State University, Indiana University, Purdue University, the University of Southern Indiana, Vincennes University, and Ivy Tech Community College.
