An Indiana Senate bill could change tenure as we know it. What you need to know.

Senate Bill 202 (SB 202), a controversial bill to overhaul the tenure process for professors and strengthen legislative oversight at Indiana’s public universities passed the Indiana Senate Tuesday and is now set for a hearing by the House education committee.

How would SB 202 affect tenure and the makeup of boards of trustees?

The bill’s author, Republican Sen. Spencer Deery, said the 52-page bill aims to combat “excessive politicalization and viewpoint discrimination” that discourages students from pursuing higher education through several key measures, including:

• Replacing two of the three alumni council-elected positions at Indiana University’s board of trustees with alumni appointed by the state’s Senate president pro tempore and House speaker.

• Establishing a board of trustees process to evaluate candidates up for tenure or promotion for “criteria related to free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

• Establishing a board of trustees review of tenured professors’ performance every five years for meeting “criteria related to free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

• Requiring public universities’ boards of trustees to adopt a “policy on neutrality” that distinguishes between the official positions of the institution and its employees, and limiting universities’ ability to make official positions on “political, moral, or ideological issues.”

• Requiring programming for new students to include information on free inquiry and free expression and “the appropriate and inappropriate responses to speech that a student finds offensive or disagreeable.”

The bill has similarities to a Florida bill signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis last year that also established tenure performance reviews every five years and was aimed at combatting perceived biases in higher education. Similar bills have been introduced in Ohio and South Carolina, among others.

What is the significance of tenure?

Tenured positions are academic appointments that effectively allow professors to teach in perpetuity, aside from extraordinary circumstances like criminal wrongdoing or the dissolving of a department.

Tenure advocates like the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), who were instrumental in making tenure standard practice in the 20th century, argue that tenure safeguards academic freedom by allowing professors to speak, teach and research freely without interference or pressure from external politics.

Yet some Republican lawmakers, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have argued tenured positions amount to “lifetime appointments” that allow professors to go unchecked amid debates about bias and indoctrination in U.S. education.

Robert Eno, a retired faculty member and member of the IU AAUP chapter, said the bill will hurt academic freedom at IU and other state universities and make it harder for IU to recruit and retain top faculty.

“Faculty members are aware, generally, that they will receive lower salaries as academics, and one of the things that makes them make an economic sacrifice to be in academia is because of tenure,” Eno said. “The main reason that everybody should be concerned about this – not just faculty – is because faculty do value academic freedom and do feel that tenure is essential as job security. If you pursue SB 202, Indiana University and Purdue are simply not going to be able to recruit top faculty anymore.”

Tenure has been on the decline in the U.S. for decades, with non-white and female professors often being among the least represented in tenured appointments. A survey by the AAUP found less than a quarter of American college professors held tenured positions in 2021, down from about 39% in 1987.

How would Senate Bill 202 impact tenure?

Critics of the bill say that by limiting the power of tenure and instituting routine oversight of tenured professors, educators will be discouraged from teaching at Indiana’s public universities.

“When you throw a bill out there that says, basically, we’re gonna give an ideological litmus test to every tenured professor every five years, there’s going to be a lot of people who say, ‘I’m not going to an institution that’s going to be playing that game,’” state Rep. Matt Pierce, D-Bloomington, said.

Pierce described SB 202 as “the greatest overreach” that he’s seen in the Legislature in a long time, and warns its impact to education could harm Indiana’s workforce at a time when new STEM opportunities are coming to the state.

“We’re hoping to attract industries that rely upon a strong link between research institutions,” Pierce said. “You’re going to lose a lot of good people.”

Eno worries if the bill is passed, Indiana University and Purdue University could both lose their classification as Research 1 universities within the next decade.“Indiana has somehow managed to build, over a century, this powerhouse of research universities. It's a tremendous asset for the state,” Eno said. “And what SB 202 would do is simply throw off any chance of continuing to recruit the type of faculty that constitute universities of that caliber. We’re just going to be giving it up.”

IU President Pamela Whitten said in a written statement that she is worried about the “unintended consequences” the bill could have for IU’s reputation as a research institution and Indiana's workforce.

“While we are still analyzing the broad potential impacts of SB 202, we are deeply concerned about language regarding faculty tenure that would 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,” Whitten's statement said.

How would Senate Bill 202 change IU's Board of Trustees?

Under current state law, three of the nine positions at IU’s Board of Trustees are elected by IU alumni. These are the only elected positions on the board; the six other positions are appointed by Indiana’s governor.

SB 202 would replace two of the the three alumni-elected positions at Indiana University, as well as other state universities, with appointments from the state Legislature. One trustee would be appointed by the Indiana Senate president pro tempore, and the other by the speaker of Indiana House of Representatives. Both appointments would "seek advice" from the minority leaders of each chamber.

Critics of the bill like Pierce say the bill would give undue political power to the Legislature, especially given Indiana’s Republican supermajority in both the Senate and House.

“They may have couched the bill in terms of some kind of neutrality, but clearly they think that somehow as conservatives, they’re being harmed,” Pierce said.

Eno said concerns of free speech and self-censorship need to be addressed, but he doesn’t believe this bill is the way to go.

“We see students on both sides encounter instances where they feel constrained and are uncomfortable, and it’s more prominent on the conservative side, and I think we need to have a discussion about how we’re going to remedy that,” Eno said. “I do think that any state intervention is not a good way to go about doing it. I think that this is a subject that universities need to discuss openly.”

Reach Brian Rosenzweig at brian@heraldt.com.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Bill changes tenure, board of trustees composition Indiana university