Right Wing Attacks on Academia Continue: Iowa Law Mandates Political Affiliation

Amidst all the furor over Milo and UC Berkeley, in which non-students staged an action to shut down a speech, the GOP keeps doing its thing - using money and access to power to try and overthrow public universities. I wrote about this most recently here for Pacific Standard and on the blog.

Latest examples:

Waiting excitedly for the libertarian free speech media to cover GOP threats to academia.
Waiting
Still waiting
Yup, still waiting
Come on.. https://t.co/oSjvnjuMke

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) February 21, 2017

The law in question has been proposed in Iowa, requiring "political balance" among professors. It comes shortly after another bill ending tenure was proposed.

A bill in the Iowa Senate seeks to achieve greater political diversity among professors at the state's Board of Regents universities. Senate File 288 would institute a hiring freeze until the number of registered Republicans and Democrats on the university faculty fall within 10 percent of each other.
"I’m under the understanding that right now they can hire people because of diversity," said the bill's author, Sen. Mark Chelgren, R-Ottumwa. "They want to have people of different thinking, different processes, different expertise. So this would fall right into category with what existing hiring practices are."

Three notes:

1) Using coercive power of the states to force ideology into public universities is the standard conservative move.

2) The couching of in the frame of "diversity" is relatively new (last 5 years or so). Of course they are actually opposed to diversity in all other contexts.

3) Legislators propose all kinds of ridiculous bills for the sake of political posturing, but such proposals don't happen in a vacuum. It may not make it through Iowa. It might not make it through the courts if  it was passed. But it will in some states. ALEC and the like help draft these bills and pass them around. This is a garbage law, and unworkable. But any hint of forcing people to declare party affiliation for hiring is a totalitarian move.

Meanwhile, I'm sure the high visibility writers with all the diversity of Chait, Haidt, Kristof, and Soave are super focused to see how the next big threat to free speech is coming from Oberlin students.

UPDATE: Also NC. I smell ALEC's legislation-writing folks at work.

NC Senate has tabled this amendment from Republican Sen. Hise to require political party quotas in hiring UNC system professors. #ncpol pic.twitter.com/2ej6oYsQLx

— Colin Campbell (@RaleighReporter) February 21, 2017

Adventures in Academic Freedom

Four stories.

1) ALEC is meeting with legislators and talking about pulling funding from public colleges and universities if they don't include more conservative views.

But meanwhile, ALEC is meeting and saying: "pull funding from schools perceived to be limiting discourse." https://t.co/zNI9e2OGYE@conor64 pic.twitter.com/OtlnTarNgL

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 8, 2017

The academic freedom PC Run Amok people don't seem to care. Note, this is a standard idea among conservatives, as evidenced by this Ben Carson interview.  If you aren't terrified by this, you aren't really concerned about academic freedom.

2) Donald Moynihan, a prof at University of Wisconsin, writes for the New York Times about these real threats. He's not focused on ALEC, but on Wisconsin lawmakers who want to censor university professors, and the threat of guns on education.

If you truly believe that a university should be a place where people are empowered to pursue a fearless sifting and winnowing of ideas and evidence that benefit us all, I have a simple request: Look at the bigger picture beyond a few elite private institutions. For those of us who teach where most American students are educated, actual triggers are a more relevant danger than trigger warnings. Safe spaces are less threatening than shutting down teaching and research spaces.

Policy makers who accuse students of weakening campus speech should lead by example. Free speech on campus has survived and will survive challenges from students and other members of civil society. Its fate is much less certain when the government decides to censor discomforting views.

3) Meanwhile, the UK is worried about PC Run Amok.  Sigh.

4) Finally, conservative academics are mostly pretty happy, rather than the besieged minority that they are alleged to be.

I should first mention that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, conservative faculty are just as happy as their liberal counterparts, if not more so. In fact, in 2014, two-thirds of conservative faculty on a nationwide survey responded “Definitely yes,” the most positive on a five-point scale, to the question “If you were to begin your career again, would you still want to be a college professor?” Nationally, an average of 58 percent of all faculty members said they would, while 56 percent of liberal faculty responded in such a positive way -- 10 points lower than right-leaning faculty. 

Interestingly, tenure does not play a role in levels of satisfaction, either. Tenured and nontenured conservative faculty members are both highly satisfied, at 65 percent and 61 percent respectively. The numbers look different for faculty members who identify as liberal: of those, 62 percent of tenured faculty would remain a professor compared to only 49 percent of those who aren’t tenured -- a nontrivial difference.