Indiana’s Republican governor has just signed new law that introduces “intellectual diversity” as a standard for tenure decisions in state universities. Under the law, campus boards of trustees will determine what intellectual diversity consists of, and lack of such diversity can be grounds for denying tenure. Intellectual diversity also must be considered in the post-tenure review process.
Please note that while I sympathize with many of the complaints I am against this new law, as I explain in my latest Bloomberg column:
Under some scenarios, right-wing and conservative professors could easily end up worse off under this new system. For purposes of argument, let’s assume the worst of a left-leaning academic department, namely that they intentionally prevent conservative professors from getting tenure. Under the new law, there is a chance that a Board of Trustees might grant tenure to a conservative voted down by the department. How would a department of committed lefties address that problem? They’d avoid hiring conservative professors at all, for fear of having their tenure decisions overturned.
Even if you think a Board of Trustees can intervene in tenure decisions in a meaningful and informed manner, they cannot run a job search, which involves going through hundreds or even thousands of applications. The bias merely will be shifted to some other part of the process.
And:
Further issues arise from how the law creates a channel that students and university employees can use to complain about the political orientations of faculty members. The net effect will be to shift power to students, which means easier classes and more grade inflation. Are those trends likely in the longer run to support conservative or classical education values in our universities? As a long-time teacher for almost forty years, I suspect not.
There are further good arguments at the link.
