Indiana bill ignites debates about tenure, free speech at public universities
Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:19 a.m. Feb. 27, 2024, to clarify language in the bill relating to requirements for new student programming.
An Indiana Senate bill that has received near-universal condemnation from faculty organizations at the state’s public universities advanced through the House education committee last Wednesday and is awaiting discussion on the House floor in the final weeks of the session.
Senate Bill 202 (SB 202), which was introduced by Sen. Spencer Deery (R-Lafayette) and cleared the Senate along party lines earlier this month, would put state universities’ boards of trustees in charge of evaluating and reviewing tenure appointments every five years for “criteria related to free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”
The proposed legislation would also limit universities’ ability to take official positions on “political, moral, or ideological issues” and require new student programming to include information on free inquiry and civil debate.
Critics of the proposed legislation — including Indiana University President Pamela Whitten and Purdue University’s faculty-led Senate – say the bill poses a near-existential threat to faculty tenure, making retaining and recruiting faculty harder and potentially eroding academic freedom. But supporters say the bill will enshrine tenure in Indiana’s laws for the first time, and argue the legislation is necessary to combat “excessive politicization” within classrooms.
“The reality is, this is a major step forward in my view, both for tenure rights, as well as for academic quality,” Deery said.
Indiana legislation similar to higher ed bills in other conservative states
Senate Bill 202 draws parallels to higher education reform bills passed in states like Florida and Texas.
In 2022, Florida Republicans passed a law that charged the state’s Board of Governors with reviewing tenured faculty appointments at Florida’s public universities every five years. Texas passed a law last year that allowed state universities’ trustee boards to fire tenured faculty for reasons including “professional incompetence” and “conduct involving moral turpitude.” Similar bills have also been introduced in Iowa, North Dakota and South Carolina.
Higher education reform bills like these aim to combat alleged liberal bias and politicization within classrooms. The 2023 Indiana Campus Free Speech Report, for example, found 55% of respondents felt conservatives could openly express their opinions on campus, compared to 72% for liberal students.
Deery, who works for the Purdue Research Foundation, said he decided to lead the charge for higher education reform in Indiana because of his background in higher education.
“I understand how higher education actually works and I can also do it in a way that stays true to its values,” Deery said “I started working with multiple universities, multiple administrators and faculty over the summer and tried to thread that needle to address some of these issues in a way that was very smart and sophisticated and not just copy and pasting what everybody else has done.”
The bill has faced more criticism and amendments since landing in the House education committee. An amended version passed the committee by a 6-4 vote on Feb. 21.
The amended bill no longer gives state lawmakers appointments to the boards of trustees for public universities. It provides an option for the Commission on Higher Education to review an employment decision under certain circumstances, such as conflicts of interest. It also provides specific examples of what trustees cannot consider when determining whether someone gets tenure, including if a faculty member has previously criticized university leadership or engaged in political activity outside their discipline.
Deery said he is pleased with the bill that’s now due for a second reading in the House, where more amendments can be proposed.
“That’s the way the process works here as it gets better and better, but I’m very pleased where we’re at,” Deery said. "I think the bill is getting better as it goes along.”
American Association of University Professors pushes back against bill
Among the fiercest critics of these higher education reform bills is the national American Association of University Professors (AAUP), an organization that was instrumental in standardizing tenure practices in the U.S. nearly a century ago.
The AAUP has approximately 44,000 members and more than 500 chapters across the country. The proposed bill has received condemnations from IU Bloomington (IUB) and Purdue’s AAUP chapters, as well as Ball State University’s Faculty Council.
Mark Criley, a senior program officer at the AAUP’s national headquarters, said SB 202 is unique for the “fine-grained involvement” it gives to trustee boards to review tenure appointments for intellectual diversity and free inquiry criteria. Criley said since the majority of trustees at state universities are appointed by Indiana’s governor, the proposed tenure review process could create a feeling of political oversight.
“Trustees, who are political appointees, would judge whether faculty members expose students to the full range of ideological and political views within their profession,” Criley said. “And that’s not a place where political appointees ought to be inserting themselves."
IU’s President Whitten has spoken out against the bill, warning the “unintended consequences” from its tenure review stipulations could “put academic freedom at risk, weaken the intellectual rigor essential to preparing students with critical thinking skills, and damage our ability to compete for the world-class faculty who are at the core of what makes IU an extraordinary research institution.”
Purdue has not released a formal statement on the bill, with Tim Doty, Purdue’s director of communications, saying administrators were “working to fully understand its details” as it advances through both chambers. A spokesman for Ball State’s top administrators declined an interview request regarding SB 202.
Senate Bill 202: ‘It’s basically giving a gag order’
The proposed legislation comes at a particularly heated time for many college campuses, as debates about the Israel-Hamas conflict and 2024 election rage inside and outside classrooms. Since last year, IUB has faced allegations of censoring pro-Palestinian activists on campus for suspending a professor and canceling a Palestinian artist’s planned exhibition – two moves that have received condemnations from free-speech organizations including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the state’s ACLU.
Renae Lesser, a graduate student at IU Bloomington, worries the bill could create a more hostile campus environment that limits academic freedom and inquiry.
“I think there’s a misunderstanding that academic freedom is just a faculty issue or an issue of tenure,” Lesser said. “But actually, I think it could impact free inquiry as a public good.”
Jennifer Erickson, a professor of anthropology at Ball State University who testified against SB 202 to the House education committee last week, said the bill’s emphasis on faculty oversight could stifle academic freedom and constitute government overreach. She points to a provision in the bill that informs new students of how to respond to speech they find "offensive and disagreeable.”
“If you’re saying that you want to be able to fire faculty for not promoting intellectual diversity, it’s basically giving a gag order to them to say: ‘Don’t upset students. Don't challenge them, or we might have to fire you,'” Erickson said.
Bryan Duarte, an assistant professor at Purdue, expressed his concerns about faculty members who research contemporary issues, which could be perceived as being intrinsically political.
“The language of the bill gives the board of trustees the power to target faculty members that they disagree with,” Duarte said. “It’s not actually about intellectual diversity because we are already intellectually diverse. Everything we write goes through peer review and we are very well aware of multiple angles on all issues we write about.”
Supporters argue SB 202 will restore ‘integrity’ to campuses
Charles Trzcinka, a member of IU Bloomington’s AAUP who supports the bill, said if passed, SB 202 would enshrine tenure in Indiana law for the first time.
Trzcinka said the bill will strengthen tenure by codifying it into state law and mandating specific actions for which professors cannot be fired or denied tenure, including criticizing their institution’s leadership, expressing dissent or engaging in public commentary on subjects, or engaging in political activities outside of their teaching or professional duties. He points to the suspension of IUB professor Abdulkader Sinno and the dismissal of IU Northwest professor Mark McPhail as evidence of the need for such statewide tenure protections.
“So don’t tell me stories about how this ends tenure. Indiana University is ending, or restricting it now,” Trzcinka said.
But Criley argues enshrining tenure into state law is dangerous, especially if it comes with apparent political tradeoffs.
“The risk when you put those protections into state law is that they’re subject to the kind of political tinkering and interference that we’re seeing in this bill,” Criley said. “I’m not sure that a bill that enshrines tenure at the state level is worth the price.”
Beyond tenure protections, Trzcinka argues the bill is necessary to ensure a wide range of topics and viewpoints are being taught in classrooms, especially in academic spaces dominated by left-leaning faculty. A 2022 FIRE survey found nearly half of faculty identified as liberal or far-left, while only 26% identified as conservative or far-right.
Chris Elmore, a Purdue University junior who chairs the Indiana Federation of College Republicans, said the proposed bill would help to foster greater intellectual diversity and encourage conservative participation at Indiana’s public universities. Elmore said in his role as the IFCR’s chairman, he’s spoken to conservative students across the state who say they were insulted by fellow students and even singled out by professors for their beliefs.
“It breaks my heart that you have to have legislation in order to protect intellectual diversity and to ensure that schools are teaching you how to think and different ways of thinking, but that’s the case,” Elmore said.
Elmore said the bill is a “good first step,” even as he hopes in the long term that legislative intervention won’t be necessary.
“Maybe the changes will be made and things will kind of balance out and calm down politically, but why not have that in there right now until that happens?” Elmore said. “I just don't understand the opposition to it. It seems like it’s an effort to continue this regime of destabilizing conservative voices.”
Deery argues the bill will help to protect higher education in Indiana as some of his constituents call for even tougher reforms — or defunding.
“I’m saying, ‘I acknowledge those problems, let’s fix them and pave the way for us to be able to fix those problems, so that we can have the landscape where we can continue to invest in our institutions of higher education because they’re so important for our state,’” Deery said. “I gain nothing from attacking universities. In fact, I’ve tried to do the opposite.”
Critics anticipate challenges to research, recruitment
Robert Eno, a member of IU’s AAUP, said the proposed bill could negatively impact Indiana’s ability to recruit and retain top faculty, and lead to IU and Purdue losing their status as Research 1 universities in the next few years.
“Top faculty will always have other places they can go,” Eno said. “This will not seem to be a welcoming environment, and certainly not one that has the type of tenure security that’s essential for this type of work.”
Indiana University, Indiana University Health and Purdue University comprise three of the top 10 employers in Indiana, and Eno worries changes to tenure could not only affect faculty, but the grants and research opportunities top tenured faculty bring.
“When they leave the university, the university loses that money, it often loses the graduate students that are part of those research grants,” Eno said. “The impact of it is going to be pretty significant, right away.”
In a 2023 survey of Texas faculty by the Texas AAUP and Texas Faculty Association, approximately 48.7% of respondents said they’d noticed fewer candidates applying to faculty positions, and 51% noticed faculty candidates “expressing hesitancy in their interviews.” Respondents also listed tenure issues as one of the chief reasons they were considering leaving the state, alongside the state’s political climate and academic freedom.
David Sanders, a West Lafayette City Council member and associate professor at Purdue, says faculty candidates have already expressed pause about Indiana’s political climate, and worries this bill could further harm faculty recruitment.
“The hostility towards women, minorities, LGBT people, that gives people pause for their willingness to come to here to Indiana,” Sanders said. “The combination of the effects on faculty, the effect on students, it’s just going to damage the reputation of Indiana universities and no one has even countered that argument.”
Trzcinka says faculty candidates who support free inquiry in their work would not be discouraged by Indiana’s tenure review laws.
“Why would a high quality chemistry professor turn down a university because of intellectual diversity?” Trzcinka said. “The fields that are complaining about this, they’re in a homogenous bubble.”
Elmore echoed those sentiments, saying tenure review could help to weed out professors who would target conservative students.
“If a professor doesn't want to come to Indiana because they want to be free to suppress conservative students, then we probably don’t want them to be a teacher at an Indiana university in the first place,” Elmore said.
Deery said much of the opposition to the bill is fueled by misinformation or lack of understanding, and encouraged concerned faculty at Indiana’s state universities to look at the bill for themselves.
“Anytime that you address that issue, I understand that people get more worried about their job security and their livelihood and then that makes them apprehensive,” Deery said. “But ultimately, I have been very cautious and deliberate to actually strengthen what, in my view, the protections of what tenure is intended to do, which is to protect you against retaliation for your criticism of the administration for the content of your research or for your outside political views.”
Noe Padilla, Jordan Smith and Brittany Carloni contributed to this report. Reach Brian Rosenzweig at brian@heraldt.com.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Indiana Senate Bill 202 requires tenure reviews of faculty every 5 years
