Indiana’s SB 202 holds promise, but needs changes to protect academic freedom

Today, the Indiana House of Representatives Committee on Education voted to advance Senate Bill 202, which already passed the Indiana Senate by a wide margin earlier this month. 

SB 202 provides extensive speech protections for both students and faculty, but it also contains significant flaws that legislators must address to protect academic freedom. 

Among its helpful provisions, it:

• Prohibits use of political litmus tests in hiring, promotion, tenure, post-tenure review, and admission, using language from FIRE’s Intellectual Freedom Protection Act.
• Requires student orientation programming on the importance of free inquiry and free expression.
• Requires institutional and departmental neutrality on political, moral, or ideological issues, similar to the Kalven Report.
• Allows the state commission for higher education to conduct a survey of students about their perceptions of free speech and academic freedom on campus.
• Expressly protects faculty members from retaliatory action based on their research or commentary, including criticism of an institution.

Even with these positive aspects, the bill’s harmful provisions require FIRE to oppose this bill unless those provisions are revised. 

For instance, SB 202 prohibits an institution from awarding tenure if a faculty member is:

(1) unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution; 

(2) 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 

(3) likely, while performing teaching or mentoring 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.

While intellectual diversity within institutions is desirable, this bill goes too far into regulating academic instruction and contains vague standards for faculty evaluation that administrators or departments could too easily abuse. 

For instance, what does it mean for a faculty member to be “unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry?” If Hoosier legislators believe institutions and academic departments lack intellectual diversity, empowering institutions to use ideological assessments of faculty in promotion or tenure decisions could be used to target minority or dissenting voices. 

Despite the laudable intention of this section to improve intellectual diversity on Indiana’s public campuses, SB 202 as drafted creates confusion and intrudes too far into the academic freedom rights of faculty.

And faculty applying subsection (2) could use it to force every course into a “survey” approach by prohibiting academics from teaching courses about specific ideologies. 

Must a professor teaching the Austrian school of economics also teach communist alternatives? Must an American history professor who criticizes the 1619 Project in class also assign readings favorable to the 1619 Project?

Subsection (3) poses vague and overbroad language similar to subsection (1). What if a biology professor penned an op-ed in the student newspaper criticizing a presidential candidate during election season? Under this provision, would that professor face sanctions for subjecting “students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline?”

Academic freedom also largely protects faculty members’ ability to opine on current events during class, so long as the content is germane to the course or doesn’t occupy a substantial amount of class time. 

The bill also requires institutions to establish a procedure for students to report faculty who seem insufficiently committed to intellectual diversity. While student feedback on faculty performance is important, establishing a forum by which students can report faculty for their academic speech is ripe for abuse. This provision will chill robust classroom instruction and discussion to the detriment of the learning environment on campus. 

Despite the laudable intention of this section to improve intellectual diversity on Indiana’s public campuses, SB 202 as drafted creates confusion and intrudes too far into the academic freedom rights of faculty.

The legislature must remove or revise these provisions in order to earn FIRE’s support for this bill.