Republicans push new federal limits on US academia

Republican leaders are pushing a new round of attempts to impose their ideological stamp on US higher education, moving through Congress a pair of initiatives that would force greater tolerance of conservative and religious perspectives while restricting institutions from pursuing racial diversity efforts.

The bills, approved by the Committee on Education and the Workforce of the Republican-majority House of Representatives, aim to exempt religious and other ideological content from federal accreditation systems designed to ensure educational value and quality, and to force colleges and universities to host and sponsor political groups they find problematic.

The committee’s chair, Virginia Foxx, described her party’s efforts as a bid to “maintain viewpoint neutrality” in higher education. The panel’s top-ranking Democrat, Bobby Scott, derided the legislation as constituting attacks on academic freedom and demographic diversity.

Both measures won approval on party-line votes, though they are regarded by experts as having questionable prospects if they face a vote in the full House, and even longer odds in the Democrat-controlled Senate.

US higher education leaders made a point of registering their opposition to the free-speech bill, repeating their past assertions during such debates that US college students already have the constitutional protections they need to express their opinions. The bill is a “heavy-handed approach” that doesn’t identify any specific free-speech problems that needed to be fixed, a collection of the nation’s top higher education associations said in a letter to the lawmakers.

While such debates might be stalemated on the federal level in the closely divided Congress, conservatives continue to impose such constraints at the state level. Two of the latest major examples are Indiana, which just enacted a law that aims to force faculty to promote conservative viewpoints as a condition for their promotion and tenure, and Alabama, which just joined a group of several states that have banned diversity promotion efforts in their public colleges and universities.

In signing the Alabama law, the state’s Republican governor, Kay Ivey, said that she generally valued diversity but would not “allow a few bad actors on college campuses” to use concepts of equity “to push their liberal political movement counter to what the majority of Alabamians believe”.

The ultimate effect of such measures wasn’t immediately obvious. In Alabama – as in Florida, which has a similar law – some university leaders have suggested they might find a way to maintain diversity efforts by simply renaming their diversity-oriented job titles or the tasks that such officials have been carrying out.

And in Indiana, both faculty and students have noted that partisan mandates to promote “intellectual diversity” – intended by their Republican proponents to boost conservative perspectives in classrooms – could just as easily be regarded as requiring additional voices from the political left.

That general atmosphere of ambiguity and self-contradiction was highlighted by some members of the House education committee in the US Congress just ahead of their vote on the accreditation and free-speech bills. Kathy Manning, a Democrat of North Carolina, cited an irony in Republicans insisting that the heads of US colleges and universities should show no favouritism toward any sides in a political debate, just weeks after they staged a hearing where they roundly chastised the presidents of three top universities – leading to the resignations of two of them – for their failure to publicly side with Israelis over Palestinians.

“How can we demand universities take a stand against the hateful, humiliating, isolating antisemitism that we condemned, while also considering legislation that would prevent them from doing so,” Ms Manning said. “This bill, I’m afraid, could actually protect the kind of extreme hate speech and rhetoric that we condemned at that now infamous hearing.”

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com