The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado approved a measure on Thursday that calls for hiring a nonpartisan group to conduct a “climate survey” on all of the system’s campuses to help determine whether the university respects political diversity, The Daily Camera reported.
The study will also evaluate other forms of diversity on the campuses, such as race, gender, and sexual orientation. The university will take bids from groups interested in conducting the survey and expects to spend about $100,000 on it. Eight of the nine regents voted in favor of the measure; the board’s chairman did not vote.
Concerns have been raised several times in Colorado in recent years over whether a liberal orthodoxy on campuses was stifling conservative views. In 2003 the president of the State Senate sent letters to the leaders of all of the institutions, asking them to explain their policies on protecting academic freedom and the steps they were taking to promote intellectual diversity in classes and in faculty recruiting.
More recently, the University of Colorado at Boulder established a new position for a “visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy,” paid for with private money, to broaden intellectual diversity at the flagship and help counter a public perception that it is ideologically biased. Steven Hayward, a fellow at the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University, in Ohio, was named to the position and starts a one-year appointment this fall.
