Republicans have grown frustrated by their inability to get their views represented on college campuses, so they have grown more assertive in passing laws to ban ideas they don’t like (such as “critical race theory” or gender studies or diversity/equity/inclusion or “divisive concepts).
Indiana is imposing a different approach. Instead of banning what it does not like, the Legislature is requiring professors to teach different points of view.
A new law in Indiana requires professors in public universities to foster a culture of “intellectual diversity” or face disciplinary actions, including termination for even those with tenure, the latest in an effort by Republicans to assert more control over what is taught in classrooms.
The law connects the job status of faculty members, regardless of whether they are tenured, to whether, in the eyes of a university’s board of trustees, they promote “free inquiry” and “free expression.” State Senator Spencer Deery, who sponsored the bill, made clear in a statement that this would entail the inclusion of more conservative viewpoints on campus.
The backlash to the legislation, which Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed March 13, has been substantial. Hundreds wrote letters or testified at hearings, and faculty senates atmultiple institutions had urged the legislature to reject the bill, condemning it as government overreach and a blow to academic free speech.
“The whole point of tenure is to protect academic freedom,” said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, who described the law as “thought policing.”
Under the Indiana law, which goes into effect in July, university trustees may not grant tenure or a promotion to faculty members who are deemed “unlikely” to promote “intellectual diversity” or to expose students to works from a range of political views. Trustees also may withhold tenure or promotion from those who are found “likely” to bring unrelated political views into the courses they are teaching.
Faculty members who already have tenure would be subject to regular reviews to determine if they are meeting all of these criteria, and if the board concludes they are not, they could be demoted or fired. The law also requires colleges to set up a procedure for students or other employees to file complaints about faculty members considered to be falling short on these requirements.
Boards are not, under the law, allowed to penalize faculty for criticizing the institution or engaging in political activity outside of their teaching duties. The restrictions do not apply to private university faculty members.
Will professors of science be allowed to teach about climate change or evolution without giving equal time to “the other side?”
Will professors of American history be allowed to teach about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and institutional racism without introducing the Confederate point of view?
This law is a serious attack on academic freedom.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
biology teachers in Tennessee in the 1970s were required to mention creationism in discussion of evolution
Yes. And the inclusion of “…under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. And more, I’m sure.
I have no problem if professors present different points of view. It is up to the students to research these points of view from various sources to find their own truth. I would say to my students, “how many countries under communism do you know of where the citizens enjoy a decent standard of living and are free to speak their truths about anything? Cuba? North Korea? The old Soviet Union? Now let’s look at countries where Capitalism is a way of life and compare.
In order to do this, one would have to find a country that is actually Communist–one in which the workers own the means of production.
There is no such country.
“their own truth”
ROFL. A proposition is a declarative statement that is either true or false. Having “their own truths” would entail living in their own alternate realities.
What George Orwell Had to Say about Alternative Facts Universes like Those of Putin and Trump | Bob Shepherd | Praxis (wordpress.com)
You can “teach” opposing views by presenting them and letting your students eviscerate them (or doing it yourself).
Like, “Some say slavery was inhumane but its defenders viewed it as an effective civilizing force for “savage Africans” and point out that slaves got free food and housing as well as job training.”
Right. When I taught composition to college students during my PhD, I used to like making students form arguments to defend terrible positions, as a way of deconstructing those arguments. E.g., what is the reasoning of those arguments, what are the emotional appeals being made, and most important, what are the unstated assumptions the arguments rely on and can’t function without. Although that was 30 years ago and I fear there’s less tolerance for risk today. I could see this ending up on social media.
And it’s not just a theoretical exercise. There are people who exist in the world who actually make these arguments. Why not present them and let students look underneath the hood.
yes yes yes
Well said, Flerp!
Flerp, having taught high-school Debate recently, I can tell you that one has to be very careful. Parents complain, and then administrators fire you. It doesn’t matter that you have not yourself come out on the side of the issue that the parent opposes. All that matters is that “Mr. Shepherd allowed students to argue that Civil War monuments should be removed, that schools should have transgender bathrooms, that the moon landing was real, blah blah blah.” I had my students write down a couple propositions that they would like to debate. Then I read them aloud to the class. One was the issue of transgender bathrooms. All I did was read aloud the students’ propositions. A colleague, a fellow teacher, whose 16-year-old daughter was in my class, went to the principal and asked her TO FIRE ME for this.
Yeah, I can (only) imagine.
This is a great exercise–teaching people to argue the weak position on a proposition. But it’s almost impossible to do these days with any topics that are actually interesting and engaging. NO ONE wants to hold a classroom debate on the school dress code or extending the school day or having year -round school and other such noncontroversial topics. The kids would die of boredom.
Take the Sandy Hook massacre.
Did it happen or was it staged?
Maybe it is just me but I think that’s a lunatic discussion.
Only Alex Jones and his cult would believe that it didn’t happen.
yup
The principal did not fire me. But she made me sit through a humiliating dressing down with that other teacher–that idiot fundamentalist moron–present.
“The fall is gonna kill you”
While state legislatures want to script and spends weeks debating bills about what a teacher can say or not, what consultants can and cannot be used, what topics are taboo – the Wizard (add any adjectives you wish) is behind the curtain (or on twitter) changing the ENTIRE system and culture of public education.
This stifling or scripting of professors (liberal professors for ages) has been around and will be. This is noise and gets votes.
These guys are out to kill public education k-12 and higher education. They want to privatize, isolate, erase, and use many Jim Crow and post-1954 tactics to create their idealized world (financial, cultural, and add to that list) are getting there by taking over school boards, state boards, superintendencies and presidencies, and snookering (best term I can come up with) corporate leaders.
Every testimony, commentary, and blog on these single-issue items that make headlines to scare the public should include what is really going on and send that to the power-audiences (voters of school boards and corporate big wigs)
The law is an attack on tenure, first and foremost, as I see it.
This law basically invites disgruntled students to make frivolous claims and Reichwing trustees to act on them to remove progressive profs.
Years ago, at Indiana University, in my intro do genetics class, the prof started the year with an overview of the evolution of life on Earth. At one point, a young woman raised her hand and said, “But where do Adam and Eve fit into all this?” I was so shocked that I don’t remember the professor’s answer. I do remember that the professor was pretty shocked, too.
I guess that in political science classes in Indiana, now, one will have to teach the alternative point of view that the world is run by shape-shifting alien Illuminati from Alpha Draconis who enter this world via their spaceport under the Vatican and take on the forms of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin, Joe Biden, and so on.
Imagine teaching US history or current events and discussing January 6, 2021.
Was it an insurrection or was it “legitimate political discourse,” as NBC’s newest hire Ronna McDaniel described it when she was chair of the RNC?
Isn’t it typical that tourists would decide to visit the U.S. Capitol by smashing windows and beating up the Capitol police? I confess that I usually pass through a metal detector when I go to the Capitol but these were patriots who are now held hostage in federal prisons for nothing more than entering through the windows instead of the doors.
Glad you has seen the lite, Sister Ravitch! An the hole thang was planed by Nancy Pelosi an the FBI.
NBC is taking a beating on Twitter for hiring McDaniel.
This bill seems to confuse fact and opinion. Presumably that is INTENTIONAL.
“The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”
Conservatives always had very few facts to support their opinions, and today’s radical right wing neo-fascist conservatives have almost no facts to support their opinions.
What’s the answer? Just pretend facts don’t exist! Putin is fighting Nazis in Ukraine. The 14th Amendment isn’t self-executing. There was no insurrection. Trump is the most honest man in history.
On the one side, you have people who believe in reality and truth. So it is very rare that they can make statements with the same absolute certainty that people who lie can. Part of the problem with the “origins of covid” coverage is that one side was being falsely accused of saying that the origins were absolutely known, when they were just pointing out that the preponderance of evidence AT THAT TIME certainly pointed to it not being a lab leak. But in perfect Orwellian manner, the other side was accusing the scientists of doing what it was doing! It was their side saying that it was a lab leak BEFORE there was any credible evidence to support that theory. (The media coverage has been so terrible that many people don’t realize there is still NOT a tremendous amount of credible evidence to support the lab leak theory, but there is now enough to make that a reasonable possibility, although the non-lab leak theory is also possible.)
Science – at least science before the right wing takes over – is always OPEN to there being alternative theories that challenge current ones. But those theories can’t just be pulled out of one’s a**. There needs to be credible evidence to support them. Science changes in response to credible evidence. It doesn’t change in response to wishful thinking of what will empower the Republican far right. Although I suppose that day is coming.
But today, our discourse has been infected with the kind of thinking this bill seems to be want more of. Maybe slavery was good, who knows? It is an opinion and must be presented on par with the truth.
This is NOT teaching students how to defend their viewpoints with facts. It is teaching them that facts and evidence do not matter. Power is truth. Facts are what Trump says they are. A fact from Newsmax is on par with a fact from a credible source.
When Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote her supposedly controversial look at history, she used true facts to support her opinion. Many of those true facts were from Harvard scholar Jill Lepore’s highly acclaimed books. I don’t believe anyone criticized her for citing a fact that wasn’t true. They just didn’t like it that she was citing facts to challenge the view of those who believed their own opinion was superior. That’s very different than offering up an alternative history that has no credible evidence to support it.
The current right wing Supreme Court seems to no longer care about credible evidence. Or credible precedent. They cite old English laws, or 19th century laws, or what the founders intended willy nilly to get the outcome they want. So it isn’t surprising the right wing wants students to learn that all of this is valid, because might makes right, and facts said by people who are right wing are as credible as facts that have evidence to support them. Opinion and fact are the same. And once the right wing says something, it can never be challenged because the facts are whatever the right wing says they are, so challenges to what they say are always based on lies.
Bravo for making the comparison to Ingsoc, NYC! Exactly.
Good points. The right gets away with repeated lies that often get accepted as fact by some.
If I was still teaching, I’d have no problem teaching different views while also teaching my students how to fact check from reliable and reputable sources after teaching them how to tell the difference between reliable and reputable sources and sites like FOX fake News.
I’d even assign two teams in each class to debate different issues from both sides, after teaching them what it means to debate and support their views with facts from reliable and reputable sources.
I’d even teach them the difference between facts and alternative facts. That would probably be a one day class lesson starting with the defintions of each one.
FACT:
noun
ˈfakt
1
a: something that has actual existence
space exploration is now a fact
b: an actual occurrence
prove the fact of damage
2
: a piece of information presented as having objective reality
These are the hard facts of the case.
3
: the quality of being actual : ACTUALITY
a question of fact hinges on evidence
4
: a thing done: such as
ALTERNATIVE FACT:
WHAT DOES ALTERNATIVE FACTS MEAN?
“Alternative facts have been called many things: falsehoods, untruths, delusions. A fact is something that actually exists—what we would call “reality” or “truth.” An alternative is one of the choices in a set of given options; typically the options are opposites of each other. So to talk about alternative facts is to talk about the opposite of reality (which is delusion), or the opposite of truth (which is untruth).”
This old, tried and true technique, is extraordinarily difficult to pull off now because of the micromanagement of what goes on in children’s classrooms. I taught Debate in a high school recently, and I constantly had parents calling the APs to complain about the topics. Would that one could actually do this. It’s almost impossible now. Some parent will complain. Some administrator will threaten to fire you.
In other news, the evil _____s of the Arizona state legislature just passed a law allowing ranchers and other landowners to SHOOT migrants crossing their land.
I wrote this letter to my Senator Niemeyer [R-IN] and Representative Slager {R-IN. This state continues to go backwards.
Dear Senator Niemeyer and Representative Slager,
I do wish politicians would quit bullying educators. They should have the freedom to teach what they know. Shame on you if you voted for this wretched bill. I certainly wouldn’t want to be teaching in this state at this time. Please notice that there has been a substantial backlash against this bill. Good grief! Now students are being encouraged to rat on their professors.
“The whole point of tenure is to protect academic freedom,” said Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, who described the law as “thought policing.”
The backlash to the legislation, which Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican, signed March 13, has been substantial. Hundreds wrote letters or testified at hearings, and faculty senates atmultiple institutions had urged the legislature to reject the bill, condemning it as government overreach and a blow to academic free speech.
Faculty members who already have tenure would be subject to regular reviews to determine if they are meeting all of these criteria, and if the board concludes they are not, they could be demoted or fired. The law also requires colleges to set up a procedure for students or other employees to file complaints about faculty members considered to be falling short on these requirements.
Wish I didn’t live in this red Republican dominated state. It is a disgrace to the whole country. Diane Ravitch is right in stating: “Will professors of American history be allowed to teach about the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow and institutional racism without introducing the Confederate point of view?”