University leadership, professors and students worry a wide-ranging bill that includes ideas being pushed by a national conservative group would have a chilling effect on how Indiana public colleges teach students and determine faculty tenure.

Senate Bill 202 is part of a broader swath of legislation nationwide — including bills in Texas, Florida and Ohio — that aim to limit job-security protections offered by academic tenure and address the perception among conservatives that college campuses are bastions of liberal ideas.

Brian DeLong, senior lecturer and debate team coach at IUPUI, worries the bill would cause professors to self-censor and remove controversial topics from course discussion, which would weaken the kind of heated discussion he sees as crucial to college classrooms.

“As the director of debate, I tap into all sorts of political arguments across the spectrum, especially and including radical perspectives and argumentation that could very well be used as evidence that I am non-inclusive of certain perspectives,” DeLong told Mirror Indy. 

DeLong was one of about 45 students, professors and university representatives who opposed Senate Bill 202 last Wednesday in a hearing before the House Education Committee. While the bill is backed by powerful Republicans in the legislature, in three hours of testimony, not one person expressed support for the bill.

The bill comes with teeth that some fear would further politicize decisions that colleges make. Two alumni members would be removed from each state college board of trustees and replaced with appointees by the House speaker and Senate president pro tempore. Both are Republicans, leading the state’s two long-standing legislative supermajorities.

Sen. Spencer Deery, R-West Lafayette, who is carrying the bill, argued the legislation is necessary to hold tenured professors accountable. More broadly, he said it would help conservative students feel comfortable in higher education.

Deery, who formerly served as Mitch Daniels’ deputy chief of staff at Purdue University, defended the legislation by arguing that the bill simply asks professors to show how they teach a variety of different topics when they are reviewed.

“That is not a big ask, in my view,” he said. 

He cited a student survey from the Indiana Commission for Higher Education. That survey, which was emailed to every student at an Indiana public college in 2022, found that 14.8% of around 18,000 respondents said that politically conservative students could not express their beliefs openly on campus as opposed to just 3.4% of politically liberal students. 

He argued that perceptions that conservative students are unwelcome on campuses are damaging to the state’s efforts to enroll 60% of students in college or credential programs by 2025.

“There (are), frankly, a number of Hoosiers that don’t feel like they belong in higher education and their parents don’t want them to go either,” Deery told Mirror Indy. “And that’s because higher education as a whole has a reputation that it’s a place where certain viewpoints are not welcomed.”

Critics of the legislation worry that imposing such restrictions on professors could cause Indiana to become less competitive and lose out to other states, as well as limit academic freedom and rigor.

In a prepared statement, Indiana University president Pamela Whitten expressed concern about the bill, saying it would threaten “the economic and cultural vitality of the state.”

The bill passed the Senate along party lines and seems to be on the same course in the House, though Democrats continued to oppose it. Rep. Ed DeLaney, D-Indianapolis, said the legislative attempt is “neutering” college professors and their abilities to speak freely in the classroom. 

Promoting ‘intellectual diversity’

The main throughline of the bill closely mirrors policy recommendations from the National Association of Scholars, a New York-based conservative higher education advocacy group. 

Deery told Mirror Indy he was not familiar with the group and that any resemblance in language likely was due to an attorney pulling phrasing that he then approved. 

The bill relies on the concept of cultivating intellectual diversity, which the bill defines as “multiple, divergent and varied scholarly perspectives on an extensive range of public policy issues.” 

For Deery, that means professors should not express political opinions that are unrelated to the topics of the class and should assign readings and materials on a variety of topics. For instance, he believes that schools teaching about Karl Marx, the philosopher who coined communist theory, should also teach Adam Smith, who’s best known as the father of capitalism.

“If there’s a scholarly work or a scholarly idea that’s important to the course discipline, they shouldn’t ignore that just because maybe it doesn’t align with their own personal political views,” Deery told Mirror Indy. 

Jeremy Young, education program director at PEN America, a free speech advocacy organization, said concepts like intellectual diversity are generally popular, but once it begins to be legislated, that’s cause for concern. 

“​​Once you put something like intellectual diversity or institutional neutrality into law, you are just creating opportunities for censorship,” Young said, “because those are subjective concepts, and whoever gets to determine them gets to decide who’s going to be censored.”

This could prove difficult in classrooms. DeLong, the debate coach, told Mirror Indy he has encountered situations where students have brought up unfounded points, including that ivermectin should be used to treat COVID-19. In those situations, he first meets with the student privately, but he also recognizes that misinformation can have adverse effects. 

“If it gets to a point in which I think that it would be harmful to the class, I shut down the conversation, and that’s our job as moderator of the classroom,” he said. 

‘A culture of suspicion’

The bill also directs colleges to create formal complaint processes so students and employees can report professors who they believe are failing to include a wide enough range of views on classroom lessons. The complaints eventually would rise to the state’s Commission for Higher Education. 

Professors argue that the legislation would create a culture that pits students against educators.

Sheron Fraser-Burgess, a professor of multicultural education at Ball State University, said she sees her role as a professor to help her students become more active and engaged citizens. That’s been the goal — and reputation — of higher education for a century, and she believes it’s under attack. 

“That brand is being tarnished by creating a culture of suspicion of putting students in a place to police their professors,” Fraser-Burgess said.

Professors also said such a complaint process is redundant. Public universities already offer both formal and informal procedures for students to express concern about their professors. 

The 56-page sweeping legislation seeks to create ways for students to report and for colleges to punish professors who they feel fail to include wide viewpoints about lessons or bring up political views they feel are unrelated to class. The bill also directs colleges to institute reviews for all faculty members every five years regardless of tenure and forbids colleges from taking stances on political issues that are unrelated to the school’s “core mission.” 

For example, at Purdue University, students can informally complain to university leaders if they have an issue with a professor. But they can also file a complaint with the school formally, whether it be for a grade dispute or an interaction that a student deems inappropriate.

To Purdue engineering education professor Alice Pawley, enshrining a system by which students can complain about professors — especially when such channels already exist — into state law is superfluous and authoritarian. 

The effects on tenure

Tenure was created to allow professors to research and understand controversial topics without fear of retaliation. The tenure process, which can take up to seven years to complete, is conducted through rigorous review by committees across the institution and the board of trustees. It ultimately protects professors from being fired for the contents of their research. 

Subjecting tenured faculty to reviews, Pawley told Mirror Indy, would defeat the purpose of tenure protections and politicize teaching.

“Tenure is supposed to protect academic freedom which is supposed to protect the search for truth, free from political meddling, because it’s about the freedom to have one’s work judged by the standards of field, not by political appointees,” she said. 

Deery argues that regulating colleges in law would benefit professors and students. Senate Bill 202 does codify several generally-accepted academic principles into law, including that tenured professors cannot be fired for their political views or for criticizing their administrations. 

Deery also suggested the Indiana bill is a compromise, pointing out that some of the national legislation, including a bill that failed to pass in Texas, would have ended tenure. 

“What’s the harm in making sure that those students know some proper avenues to express their concerns in a way that isn’t going to lead them to just flunk the class?” Deery asked. “I don’t see why that is so alarming if that’s something that we already have.”

The harm, college professors say, could be a decline in the number of qualified professionals who want to teach. 

After Florida passed a law in May with a similar five-year tenure review provision, nearly 300 out of 642 Florida faculty members who responded to a survey said they were looking to work out of state in the next year, according to reporting from the Tallahassee Democrat.  

“Should this five-year schedule be implemented, I frankly don’t know why anyone would bother to go into academia,” Fraser-Burgess told Mirror Indy. “It’s not a healthy place to be.”

Claire Rafford covers higher education for Mirror Indy in partnership with Open Campus.

Got a higher ed story? Contact reporter Claire Rafford at claire.rafford@mirrorindy.org or follow on X/Instagram @clairerafford.