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Tag: Academic Freedom

  • Why did UNC reserve the right to secretly record professors?

    Higher Stakes is a weekly newsletter about higher education from The News & Observer and reporter Jane Winik Sartwell.

    Higher Stakes is a weekly newsletter about higher education from The News & Observer and reporter Jane Winik Sartwell.

    File images; graphic by Rachel Handley

    Happy Tuesday, everybody! I’m Jane Winik Sartwell, your guide to higher education in North Carolina. In case you missed it, here’s a little about me and how I plan to approach this role. In this week’s edition of Higher Stakes, we’ll cover both Girl Scout cookies and defense weaponry. How’s that for range?

    Why does UNC want to secretly record professors?

    Many UNC-Chapel Hill classrooms have a camera mounted on the wall, ostensibly as a tool for instructors to record their lectures. But instructors aren’t the only ones with access to the camera. All it takes is for the university to tap into it to secretly record classroom activity.

    Under a policy that took effect Monday, that’s completely kosher.

    Leadership at UNC-Chapel Hill gave themselves the right to secretly record classes without the professor’s knowledge. Recordings can happen when there’s a suspected violation of university policy, or “for any other lawful purpose.” The university said that recordings will only occur in “rare and exceptional circumstances, when there are compelling legal or compliance reasons.”

    UNC Faculty Council chair Beth Moracco told me she “can’t imagine such a circumstance” where secret recording by the university would be necessary. “We had asked for some details about what would be a circumstance in which permission would be granted [to record], and there weren’t any details or examples provided. That leaves it open to speculation and open to the fear that it could be used frivolously or with a kind of malicious intent.”

    But just because there was previously no policy doesn’t mean the university hasn’t secretly recorded classes before. In 2024, the school notified then-UNC business professor Larry Chavis that it had surreptitiously recorded four of his classes through the Panopto camera in his classroom following “reports concerning class content and conduct.” He was later let go.

    Some faculty are worried about the official policy’s potential chilling effect on classrooms.

    “Simply the knowledge that a class could be recorded may cause students and instructors to self-censor and avoid introducing controversial topics, or challenging established orthodoxy, which is antithetical to the vibrant learning environments we seek to create in our classrooms,” Moracco wrote in a Feb. 13 letter to the faculty.

    This time next year, I’ll definitely be requesting UNC’s annual report the school promises to create on how many recordings are requested, approved, and made. I’ll share that with you as soon as I have it.

    A look at foreign funding in NC higher education

    Last week, the Trump administration launched a data-visualization platform to inspect foreign funding in higher education. It synthesizes funding from foreign countries and displays cumulative totals since 1986, when the government first started requiring that colleges disclose foreign gifts and contracts over $250,000. Here’s where North Carolina colleges and universities stack up.

    • Duke University has received the 14th-highest amount of foreign funding among American universities, at more than $1 billion. The top countries are Ireland, France, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden. The website also singles out $76 million in Chinese funding.
    • Next up is UNC-Chapel Hill at $134 million in foreign funding. The top countries are Germany, Canada, England, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
    • NC State University has received $81 million from foreign countries, primarily Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Peru and Brazil.
    • Elon University’s foreign total comes in at $38 million, from countries like Italy, England, the United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland.
    • Wake Forest University has received $29 million, primarily from the United Kingdom, the Bahamas, India, Switzerland and England.

    I spoke with Sarah Spreitzer, an expert with the American Council on Education, about these numbers. She’s concerned that the new portal, developed in part by the company Palantir, is misleading because it doesn’t indicate the dates of reported foreign funding. In the past, public records of this data made it possible to compare the numbers year-over-year and discern trends.

    “I’m concerned that this actually makes it less transparent,” Spreitzer said.

    Duke business students sell Girl Scout cookies

    If you’re looking for some higher ed content to spice up your Instagram Reels algorithm, look no further than Duke entrepreneurship professor Aaron Dinin, or @aarondinin. He teaches a class called Learning to Fail, in which students participate in semi-absurd challenges, like trying to sell a Jolly Rancher for $100, doing an 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle in one hour, or selling 92 boxes of Girl Scout cookies on campus (beating the record set by Dinin’s daughter). He also has videos on whether students still do their homework while living in tents waiting to get tickets to the Duke-UNC game and whether they can answer questions without the help of the internet. It’s all pretty entertaining.

    NC State goes all in on military

    NC State University is launching a brand-new Defense and Security Institute. At the same time, NC State says it has been “invited into [a] special group” to compete for task orders coming out of a $151 billion federal missile defense contract called SHIELD. That program seeks to develop a defense system to protect the United States.

    As one of the universities on the SHIELD contract, NC State is “in a pool of pre-qualified organizations, which means we can move faster when specific project needs arise,” Krista Walton, vice chancellor for research and innovation at NC State, said.

    The work of the Defense and Security Institute won’t be focused on weapons development, but rather “dual use technology, which means that the same kinds of innovations can support national security and civilian needs,” Walton said. Examples include energy reliability, cybersecurity, infrastructure resilience, and supply chain security. Students will get hands-on experience that prepares them for careers in national security.

    “Having the institute really provides this clear, centralized front door that makes it easy for federal industry and military partners to engage with us,” Walton said.

    Headlines you don’t want to miss

    What I’m reading

    Thanks for reading. See you back here next week.

    – Jane Winik Sartwell

    Not a subscriber? Sign up on our website to receive Higher Stakes in your inbox each week: newsobserver.com/newsletters.

    Jane Winik Sartwell

    The News & Observer

    Jane Winik Sartwell covers higher education for The News & Observer. 

    Jane Winik Sartwell

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  • How Viewpoint Diversity Can Help Protect Academics from Themselves (and Perhaps Help Heal Our Civic Culture Too)

    Ohio State Professor Michael Clune, who caused a bit of a stir in academia with hhis December 2024 essay “We Asked for It,” has a new essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education responding to a recent critique of the push for heterodoxy and intellectual pluralism on campus. The essay, “Professors Can Be Ignorant. That’s Why We Need Viewpoint Diversity,” begins:

    It’s hard to succeed as an educator when you don’t know what you’re talking about. And yet many professors of the humanities and social sciences — teaching and writing on topics such as capitalism, police reform, and sexuality — fail a simple, classic test. To understand your own position, you must be aware of, and be able to respond to, objections to that position. We need greater diversity of political and social views in academe not because diversity is a higher value than truth, but because academics’ intellectual isolation has compromised their capacity to pursue truth.

    In an academic environment in which objections to the reigning political, social, and cultural assumptions are castigated as beyond the pale of academic discussion, professors find themselves dangerously isolated, ignorant of how their students and fellow citizens view their behavior. Discussing faculty posts on social media about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a student at the University of Texas at Austin writes: “I’ve learned that there are people on my college campus who would cheer if someone like me, a young person who openly expresses my traditional Christian beliefs and right-wing political views, were murdered.”

    This is not the lesson most faculty members intend to teach, but many professors simply don’t know how they appear to nonacademics and don’t know how to respond appropriately to ideas that differ from their own. Professors in many fields tend to think that disagreement with their disciplines’ consensus (on, say, police reform, capitalism, or gender) is equivalent to Holocaust denial, or, as Lisa Siraganian puts it in a recent essay in Academe attacking viewpoint diversity, denying the double-helix model of DNA.

    As Clune discusses (and those of us with heterodox views in academia often experience) the lack of intellectual diversity in many departments and disciplines produces an epistemological failure and undermines academic inquiry, and this is particularly problematic in the humanities and social sciences.

    the best case for intellectual diversity is a pragmatic one. While the sciences have hardly been immune to ideological distortions, not all fields suffer equally from a lack of different political perspectives. Some fields may not suffer any epistemological consequences at all. The goal of the university is the pursuit of truth; the pursuit of intellectual diversity is best seen as a means to that end. Physics or civil engineering may not be seriously compromised by ideological conformity; whether a biochemist is conservative or liberal may well have no effect at all on her teaching and research.

    But I have come to believe that the questions asked by historians, literary scholars, and political scientists — which necessarily touch on matters of intense political controversy — cannot be adequately posed or answered in an atmosphere of ideological closure. . . .

    The social sciences may well survive widespread epistemological failure and ideological closure, but the humanities may not be so lucky.

    I fear that colleges’ response to the political distortions of humanities disciplines will be to further marginalize and defund these disciplines. But the very feature of the humanities that renders them vulnerable to distortion by ideological conformity is also the source of their immense value to the educational enterprise. We are, ultimately, after human truths — the meaning of happiness, the nature of revolutions, the right way to organize a government, the best way to interpret a text or to judge a work of art. Our work engages passions and values that animate everyone’s lives.

    To see beyond our passions, to step outside our prejudices, to suspend our most powerful commitments — this is a discipline, and a difficult one. It is the humanities’ proper discipline, and at this moment it requires welcoming new perspectives and voices into our classrooms and lecture halls. The creation of spaces in which the humanistic pursuit of truth can truly flourish may also be what this violent and divided nation most needs from higher education.

    One way to address these concerns may to take Professor John McGinnis’ advice and focus more on teaching students to disagree productively. This will help universities combat epistemic closure, and perhaps help heal our civic culture as well. In theory, law schools already do this, but the lack of meaningful ideological diversity hampers such efforts from being more effective.

    An educational system should aspire to make citizens pass an “ideological Turing test,” demonstrating the ability to present the strongest case for views they reject so persuasively that an examiner cannot infer their own. A person who can do so earns rapport across the aisle by grasping the full force of the arguments that motivate opponents.

    Sadly, education at all stages today hinders the ability to pass this kind of test. . . .

    Universities can still bend the civic arc if they return to their first vocation: truth-seeking through contestation. A democracy only functions well if its elites model respectful disagreement. That kind of respect is the first step to creating a political atmosphere free from fear and threat. This atmosphere is itself conducive to the willingness to compromise on which pluralist democracy depends.

    Jonathan H. Adler

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  • Newsom chides USC to ‘do the right thing’ for academic freedom and resist Trump compact

    Gov. Newsom on Friday waded further into the controversy surrounding a higher education compact President Trump has presented to nine universities including USC, chiding campus leadership to “do the right thing” and reject the offer.

    The compact, sent Wednesday to the University of Southern California and other campuses nationwide, has roiled higher education with its demands for rightward campus policy shifts in exchange for priority federal funding.

    On Thursday, Newsom swung back at the Trump proposal and threatened to cut “billions” of dollars in state funding to any California university that agrees to it.

    Newsom offered fiery remarks during a bill signing at UC Berkeley on Friday, escalating the stakes in the high-pressure decision confronting USC.

    “Do the right thing,” he said. “What’s the point of the system? What’s the point of the university? What’s the point of all of this if we don’t have academic freedom? … It’s not a choice, and the fact that I felt I needed to even send that message is rather shocking, because some people think it is.”

    Newsom scoffed at the notion that USC, a private institution, even has to deliberate over the Trump offer — calling it a “false choice.”

    The compact’s conservative goals

    The White House offer to USC and a small group of prominent universities — among them the University of Arizona, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas and Brown University — calls on campuses to follow Trump’s views on admissions, diversity and free speech, among other areas. In exchange, they would get more favorable access to federal research grants and additional funding, in addition to other benefits.

    Universities would also have to accept the government’s definition of gender and would not be allowed to recognize transgender people’s gender identities. Foreign student enrollment would be restricted. In regards to free speech, schools would have to commit to promoting a wide range of views on campus — and change or abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas,” according to the compact.

    In a campus letter Friday, USC interim President Beong-Soo Kim said the White House offer “covers a number of issues that I believe are important to study and discuss.”

    “I have already heard from several members of our community, and in the weeks ahead, I will be consulting with the Board of Trustees; the deans and leadership team; and members of the Academic Senate, the Academic Freedom Task Force, the President’s Faculty Advisory Committee, and other stakeholder groups to hear their wide-ranging perspectives,” Kim said. “These conversations can take time, but they are essential to building trust and community.”

    He said it was his responsibility to “advance USC’s mission and uphold our core values.”

    Speaking at the Berkeley event, Newsom said USC is among California’s “great universities” that are “all in this together” as campuses face an uncertain and rocky future amid the Trump presidency.

    A day earlier the governor threatened to withhold Cal Grants, the state’s largest financial aid program to California public and private universities that sign onto Trump’s deal. The grants are awarded based on income, and students become eligible through the Free Application for Federal Student Aid or California Dream Act Application.

    In 2024-25, $2.5 billion in Cal Grants were doled out statewide. USC received Cal Grants worth about $28 million during that academic year.

    UC negotiations ongoing

    In response to a question about the proposal to USC and whether Newsom would issue the same threat of removing state funding to UCLA — the subject of ongoing negotiations over a sprawling U.S. Department of Justice antisemitism investigation — the governor said he was “not concerned” about the UC system.

    “I’m not concerned about their capacity to organize a strategy that’s thoughtful and deliberative that maintains our values … without resorting to the kind of expressed concerns that I have about the university in question that was on that list,” Newsom said.

    As UCLA continues to negotiate with the Trump administration, Newsom said he has confidence in the university system, whose leaders have been working “collaboratively for weeks” to come to a resolution.

    The governor’s more tempered remarks were a shift from his comments in August and September, when he said UC should “sue” Trump and should not “bend the knee,” a reference to his belief that the deals made by Brown and Columbia universities with the White House were bad moves that empowered the government to target more campuses.

    “Governor Newsom, [UC] President [James B.] Milliken and the board of regents are fully aligned in protecting the values, integrity and unparalleled quality of the University of California system,” UC Board of Regents Chair Janet Reilly said Friday in a statement to The Times following Newsom’s comments.

    In a Friday letter, Milliken said the Trump compact was also a subject of talks among system leaders.

    “Just within the last few days, the administration has announced a plan to impose a myriad of new requirements on universities seeking federal funding, which we will discuss soon with faculty leadership,” said Milliken, without elaborating on the matter.

    The Trump proposal has not been sent to UC. A White House official said the initial campuses on its list were the first group in potentially many more colleges to receive the terms.

    After the Justice Department found in July that UCLA violated Jewish students’ rights amid its response to spring 2024 pro-Palestinian demonstrations, the Trump administration sought a nearly $1.2-billion penalty from the school. The government is also seeking changes over admissions, foreign student enrollment, diversity programs and other GOP priorities in higher education.

    While praising UC’s handling of federal negotiations, Newsom was less supportive of recent actions by UC Berkeley to release the personal information of 160 employees to Department of Education as part of a federal investigation into alleged campus antisemitism.

    UC officials said they strive to protect employee privacy and were required to share information with the department because it enforces civil rights law on campuses. Faculty have criticized the move, with some likening it to anti-free speech practices during the McCarthy era.

    Newsom said he “requested an independent review” of the data release in order to “make a judgment as to whether or not it was appropriate, whether or not it was consistent with past practices or whether or not it should be adjusted in terms of policy.”

    USC ‘between a rock and a hard place’

    Rick Hess, an education analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, said Newsom’s remarks “seemed not inappropriate.”

    “If a [Kamala] Harris administration had tried something like this, I think Republican governors would be equally livid,” said Hess, director of the institute’s education policy studies.

    “USC is between a rock and a hard place,” Hess added. “If they say no, what does any of this mean? What does it mean to not be prioritized for federal research funds? Does that mean the tap will be shut off? On the other hand, once you’ve signed … will the administration abide by the promises it has made? Part of the problem is, it is not entirely clear what it means to say yes and what it means to say no.”

    Newsom blasted institutions that have already “sold out” by signing Trump’s compact. The University of Texas has suggested it could agree to the terms. Leaders of the Texas system were “honored” that the Austin campus was chosen to be a part of the compact and its “potential funding advantages,” according to a Thursday statement from Kevin Eltife, chair of the board of regents.

    “In this state, our state of mind must be resolute,” said Newsom. “I don’t mean to put pressure on people. I need to put pressure on this moment and pressure test where we are in U.S. history, not just California history. And so forgive me for being so firm. This is it. We are losing this country.”

    Daniel Miller, Melody Gutierrez, Jaweed Kaleem

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  • Video of Education Law and Policy Panel on “Federal Efforts to Combat Antisemitism: Restoring Campus Civil Rights or Infringing Academic Freedom?”

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    Below is a video of the panel on “Federal Efforts to Combat Antisemitism: Restoring Campus Civil Rights or Infringing Academic Freedom?” from the recent Education Law and Policy Conference, co-sponsored by the Federalist Society and the Defense of Freedom Institute. I was one of the participants. The others were Tyler Coward (Lead Counsel, Government Affairs, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)), Ken Marcus (Chairman & Founder, Brandeis Center), and  Sarah Perry (Vice President & Legal Fellow, Defending Education). Carlos Muniz, Chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, moderated.

    Not surprisingly, Tyler Coward and I were much more critical of the the Trump Administration’s policies than Perry and Marcus. In my view, much of what is being done under the pretext of combatting campus anti-Semitism is actually undermining freedom of speech and academic freedom, and also illegally seeking federal control over state and private universities. But there were more areas of agreement. For example, we all agreed that the federal government cannot properly seek control over university curricula (Perry even said the Trump Administration’s efforts to do so at Harvard gave her “apoplexy”) and that campus protests that devolve into violence and disruption must be banned, and are subject to punishment. Though in my view, not all of the latter qualify as anti-Semitic, and some are properly addressed by state and local law, rather than federal enforcement.

    We also all agree that Jews are among the groups protected by Title VI (the federal law banning racial and “national origin” discrimination in educational institutions receiving federal funding). This position was once controversial, but has gained widespread cross-ideological acceptance more recently. On the other hand, Marcus and I differed over whether the very broad IHRA definition of anti-Semitism is the right one to apply in this context. In my view- as applied to anti-discrimination law, that definition creates dangers similar to those of overbroad definitions of racism and sexism, traditionally decried by conservatives and libertarians.

     

    I have previously written about campus anti-Israel protests here and about far-left versions of anti-Semitism here (discussing, among other things, how they differ from right-wing/nationalist anti-Semitism).

    Ilya Somin

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  • Federal judge overturns Trump’s Harvard funding freeze

    BOSTON — A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s move to freeze $2.2 billion in research funding for Harvard University was unconstitutional.

    The ruling issued Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs in Boston said the funding freeze amounted to “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional coercion” against the Ivy League school for refusing to yield to the White House’s “ideologically motivated” policy demands.


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    By Christian M. Wade | Statehouse Reporter

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  • Gov. Greg Abbott Is Sued For His TikTok Ban on College Campuses

    Gov. Greg Abbott Is Sued For His TikTok Ban on College Campuses

    A group of Texas professors filed a lawsuit Thursday against Gov. Greg Abbott (R), alleging that his ban on TikTok at Texas public universities violates the First Amendment and prevents professors from conducting their TikTok-related research.

    “Banning public university faculty from studying and teaching with TikTok is not a sensible or constitutional response to concerns about data-collection and disinformation,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement. “Texas must pursue its objectives with tools that don’t impose such a heavy burden on First Amendment rights. Privacy legislation would be a good place to start.”

    The lawsuit was filed by the Knight Institute on behalf the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, which is a nonprofit that was founded in 2022 “to advance, defend, and sustain the right to study the impact of technology on society.”

    Texas banned TikTok in December because of “security risks associated with the use of TikTok,” Abbott said in a news release.

    According to the lawsuit, the TikTok ban is “unconstitutional” and “seriously impeding” college faculty from completing any TikTok-related research “that would illuminate or counter the data-collection and disinformation-related practices that the ban is ostensibly meant to address.”

    The ban has forced Jacqueline Vickery, an associate professor in the Department of Media Arts at the University of North Texas, to change her research, which focuses on how “young people use social media for informal learning, activism, and self-expression,” as well as change the way she teaches, according to the lawsuit.

    Abbott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    At least 35 states have banned TikTok on state devices and networks, according to the Knight Institute. Montana became the first state to ban TikTok on all personal devices operating within the state.

    “Texas’s TikTok ban is an assault on academic freedom, which is the lifeblood of every university and a central concern of the First Amendment,” Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, said in a statement. “The court should make clear that Texas can’t shut down an important avenue of teaching and research at its public universities when there are far less intrusive measures that would secure its aims.”

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  • Indiana’s Funding Ban for Kinsey Sex-Research Institute Threatens Academic Freedom, IU President Says

    Indiana’s Funding Ban for Kinsey Sex-Research Institute Threatens Academic Freedom, IU President Says

    The decision to ban state funding for Indiana University at Bloomington’s famed sex-research institute threatens academic freedom and sets a “troubling precedent” for legislative interference in research nationwide, the university’s president, Pamela Whitten, said in a recent public statement. The ban, included in the state budget after a heated debate, was inspired by a conservative lawmaker’s unproven claims, based on decades of circulated rumors, that the Kinsey Institute’s founder had promoted pedophilia and that the institute endangered children.

    The state doesn’t allocate any money directly for the institute, which receives the vast majority of its funding from grants and outside philanthropy, so the impact of this specific prohibition will be mostly administrative and symbolic. The state simply gives money to the university, which until now, it could spend on the institute.

    The institute was founded in 1947 at the Bloomington campus as the Institute for Sex Research. Its founder, Alfred C. Kinsey, was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology who had been teaching a college course on marriage and was surprised by how little his students knew about sexuality. After founding the institute, he and his team collected and studied thousands of sexual histories. Kinsey, who died in 1956, rose to national prominence after the publication of his books Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953.

    In the former, he argued that human sexuality existed on a continuum from heterosexual to homosexual, and that people didn’t neatly fit one or the other. Because Kinsey’s research included extensive interviews with at least one pedophile, his fiercest critics accused him of encouraging sexual deviancy. Others questioned his research methods and data.

    In the second book, Kinsey examined the sex life of American women, which outraged many 1950s readers with its findings about the frequency of premarital sex and masturbation. Congressional critics accused the Rockefeller Foundation of contributing to the nation’s moral decay by funding the research. It stopped doing so in 1954, two years before Kinsey’s death.

    Among the contemporary topics the institute studies are issues related to reproductive health, sexually transmitted disease, teen pregnancy, and sexual abuse. It also delves into relationships and dating. Researchers should be protected from interference with such work, the university’s president wrote in a prepared statement last month.

    “As a premier research institution with a 200-year legacy of impact within our state and around the world, IU is firmly committed to academic freedom,” Whitten wrote. “The university is concerned that a provision singling out a specific research institute sets a troubling precedent with implications that could limit the ability of public colleges and universities to pursue research and scholarship that benefits people and improves lives.”

    She went on to say that the university will conduct a thorough legal review to ensure it follows state law and added that it’s “committed to the ongoing crucial research and robust scholarship conducted by IU faculty and the Kinsey Institute.” In a letter to faculty and staff members, Whitten and other top campus administrators said the university will continue to support the institute’s faculty in finding and securing the research grants and private philanthropic support that already make up the vast majority of its funding.

    The budget signed by Eric J. Holcolm, Indiana’s Republican governor, specifically prohibits state money from being used to cover the institute’s on-campus facilities, research work, utilities, office supplies, and maintenance of research photographs or films.

    The stipulation banning state spending on the Kinsey Institute’s work was introduced by Rep. Lorissa Sweet, a Republican from Wabash. She introduced it as an amendment to the proposed budget because of her objections to the institute’s founder, whom she accused on the House floor of exploiting children through interviews with adults talking about how children experience orgasm. Sweet, who did not respond to requests for comment, also suggested that the institute continues to support sexual abusers, a claim that has never been proved.

    On its website, the institute urged its supporters to take to social media and other channels to “defend the right to conduct sex research.” The budget restriction “takes aim at the very foundation of academic freedom and stifles critical research on sexuality, gender, relationships, and reproduction,” it said.

    “Since 1947, the Kinsey Institute has been an international thought leader in providing an unbiased and apolitical scientific approach to human sexuality,” the website post said. “In this time of divisive politics and the rise of disinformation, Kinsey Institute research, education, and historical preservation are more important than ever.”

    The university did not make the president or the institute’s executive director, Justin R. Garcia, available for interviews, but it referred The Chronicle to an opinion piece published this week in The Washington Post that’s also posted on the institute’s website.

    “For generations, the Kinsey Institute has shone a light on diverse aspects of sex and sexuality, in pursuit of answers that bring us closer to understanding fundamental questions of human existence,” Garcia, who is a senior scientist at the institute and also a professor of gender studies, wrote. Sweet, the lawmaker who introduced the budget amendment, had “parroted false allegations of sexual predation in the institute’s historical research and ongoing work, which the institute, the university, and outside experts have repeatedly refuted.”

    Rep. Matt Pierce, a Democrat whose Bloomington district includes the flagship campus, said, “These same unproven allegations about Kinsey were circulating about 20 years ago. Really crazy stuff about Kinsey experimenting with children and babies that were circulating in these conservative culture-war stories.” The reports were being recirculated because of a 1998 book by a conservative author, Judith A. Reisman, that accused Kinsey of shaking the nation’s moral foundation with dangerous research and exploitive experiments on children.

    Pierce, who is also a senior lecturer in the university’s Media School, was among a group of state legislators who visited the institute to investigate and found that there was no evidence to back up their fellow lawmakers’ concerns that children were being exploited.

    “Because the author requested a roll call vote, that locked it in,” Pierce said in an interview on Friday. The amendment passed 53 to 34. “Hard-core Republicans who actually believed this stuff voted for it, but others who were fearful of being taken out in a Republican primary went along with it, figuring, ‘I’m not going to lose my seat over this.’” Sweet, the bill’s author, is a freshman who toppled a longtime moderate Republican incumbent, Pierce pointed out.

    When Kinsey’s report on women’s sexuality came out in the 1950s, Pierce said, “it showed that women were more sexually active than people believed, and there was an explosion of moral panic — ‘You’re lying. This can’t be true.’”

    The same moral panic, he said, has been happening in Indiana around transgender people. The governor last month signed into law a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Kinsey’s research about the fluidity of gender may have alarmed many of those same lawmakers who approved the ban, Pierce said.

    He told his colleagues during a heated floor debate that, even if they believed what was being said about Kinsey, “it was 50 to 70 years ago,” and that today, federal laws and university policies protect research subjects.

    While the ban on using state funds will force the university to go through time-consuming checks to be sure public money isn’t going toward institute costs, “To me, the greater concern is the precedent that the legislator is attempting to stamp out a whole area of academic inquiry,” Pierce said. “What will be next?”

    In his opinion piece in The Washington Post, Garcia described the institute as the leading sex-research institute in the world, staffed by internationally renowned biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, health scientists, and demographers. The institute, he wrote, publishes dozens of scientific and academic articles each year across a variety of disciplines. Its critics, over the decades, have painted a far different picture, blaming the research center for promoting homosexuality and pornography, inciting the sexual revolution, and tearing away at the nation’s moral fabric.

    Garcia warned that Indiana isn’t alone in seeing debates over gender and sexuality become politicized. Legislators elsewhere, he wrote, are ignoring scientific evidence in passing laws that restrict reproductive health care, discussions of gender identity, and basic sex education. Despite the latest setback, he wrote, “I am optimistic that this latest culture war will pass. And the Kinsey Institute will carry on.”

    Katherine Mangan

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  • Hundreds of Students, Faculty, and Administrators Speak Out Against Ohio’s Proposal to Reform Public Colleges

    Hundreds of Students, Faculty, and Administrators Speak Out Against Ohio’s Proposal to Reform Public Colleges

    Florida and Texas have drawn much of the national attention over lawmakers’ efforts to reform higher ed this year. But Ohio’s legislature hosted a dramatic, seven-hour committee hearing on Wednesday — in which hundreds of students, faculty, and administrators sought to articulate the consequences of lawmakers’ sweeping proposed changes to public colleges in the state.

    Introduced in the Ohio Senate last month, the 39-page SB 83 would ban mandatory diversity training, prohibit the use of diversity statements in hiring or admissions, and prevent higher-ed employees from striking. It could also have the effect of preventing institutions from funding diversity offices.

    SB 83 would also prevent institutions from accepting donations from individuals or institutions based in China, as well as require colleges to institute new post-tenure-review policies; use specific, state-mandated language in their mission statements; and post all course syllabi on their websites.

    The hearing, held by the state Senate’s Workforce and Higher Education Committee, drew over 100 professors and over 90 students, most of them undergraduates, and most of them testifying in opposition to the bill.

    A dozen college staff members and administrators voiced opposition, including the dean of Ohio State University’s College of Public Health. The Ohio School Psychologists Association argued that the legislation could cause all school-psychologist training programs in the state to lose their accreditation.

    Six people testified in support of the bill.

    Bobby McAlpine, undergraduate student-body president at Ohio State, said he commissioned a survey of almost 1,600 undergraduates, with 82 percent responding that they “do not believe that Ohio State faculty, staff, or administration seek to impose certain political beliefs on them.” Ohio State has about 47,000 undergraduates.

    According to McAlpine, 86 percent of student respondents said Ohio State’s DEI efforts were meaningful in some way. One respondent who answered that such efforts were not meaningful wrote: “Why should we have to learn about them anyway? They don’t even deserve to be here. Senate Bill 83 should be passed.”

    Such a statement shows that the legislation is having an impact on campus, McAlpine said. “We’re already seeing, in this huge survey size of people, that the language of this bill is clearly making students already speak out against people that look like me, against people that have marginalized identities,” he said.

    Potential Impacts

    At Wednesday’s hearing, Republican lawmakers spoke of the bill as a way to level the academic playing field for conservative students who, they said, are often scared to speak up in class or face retaliation for their opinions when they do.

    State Rep. Josh Williams, a Republican and proponent of the bill, said he had that experience while pursuing a law degree at the University of Toledo. During a class, he said, he expressed the opinion that the United States shouldn’t adopt an open-border policy. Later, Williams said, a law professor commented on one of Williams’s Facebook posts, saying that his views reminded him of the Nazi Party. Williams said he was also harassed by fellow students, both online and in class.

    On another occasion while attending law school, Williams said, a student with opposing views deliberately signed up to be his note taker (a disability accommodation enabled Williams to get notes taken for days he missed). But Williams said the student refused to take notes for him on the days he missed class. After he reported the student to the university, the note taker would copy down the law cases discussed in class only as they appeared in the textbook. An investigation was eventually opened into the notetaking, according to Williams.

    “I have personally been warned that I would be blocked for advancement in the space of higher education for expressing opinions widely accepted outside of academia,” Williams said.

    Students and others who opposed the bill expressed concern with its language surrounding “controversial beliefs or policies,” which some said could be construed to prevent factual scientific concepts, like climate change, from being taught.

    SB 83 would require faculty and staff to “allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial matters and shall not seek to inculcate any social, political, or religious point of view.”

    The bill defines “controversial beliefs and policies” as “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate change, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”

    It is unclear what would happen to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs if SB 83 is passed. The bill states: “No state institution shall fund, facilitate, or provide any support to any position, material benefit, policy, program, and activity that advantages or disadvantages faculty, staff, or students by any group identity, except that the institution may advantage citizens of the United States or this state.” (The Chronicle has included SB 83 in our interactive tracker of DEI legislation across the states.)

    A fiscal note on the bill’s financial impact — written by the Ohio Legislative Service Commission, a nonpartisan group that provides financial and policy analysis to the Ohio General Assembly — said that while passage of the bill could result in some cost savings for universities, it could also significantly increase costs.

    “Some of these provisions may marginally increase administrative costs for state institutions, while others will increase administrative costs more substantially. When taken as a whole, however, administrative costs may increase significantly, potentially resulting in the need to hire additional staff to handle the increased workload,” reads the analysis.

    The analysis also said that SB 83 would raise costs for the Ohio Department of Higher Education, which is funded by the state.

    Some students who testified against the bill said they are deliberately choosing to attend graduate school outside the state, and they believe other students will follow suit if SB 83 passes.

    “I applied to five of the best schools in the entire nation for my graduate field, and I got into every single one of them with funding to boot. All not in Ohio, because I am intimately familiar that this bill might actually impact my graduate education, and therefore, I am choosing to go elsewhere,” said Lalitha Pamidigantam.

    At Wednesday’s hearing, Sen. Jerry C. Cirino, a Republican and the bill’s primary sponsor, said SB 83 does not attack or weaken tenure.

    “I’ve had lots of dialogue with our university presidents about this subject, and they have made a strong case that eliminating tenure would be very disadvantageous for the state of Ohio, so this bill does not do that,” Cirino said.

    He was also adamant that the bill would not eliminate DEI programs.

    “DEI is not outlawed in SB 83. The mandatory nature of it would be,” Cirino said. He later added, “I’ve had a lot of questions from people who obviously haven’t read the bill, because” DEI is “not prohibited in SB 83. I’d just like to clear that up.”

    Kate Marijolovic

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  • Professors Are Sharply Divided on DEI Statements in Hiring, Survey Finds

    Professors Are Sharply Divided on DEI Statements in Hiring, Survey Finds

    As diversity statements in faculty hiring are increasingly scrutinized by Republican-controlled state legislatures, a new survey suggests that faculty members themselves are sharply divided on the issue.

    The survey, the results of which were released Tuesday by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, asked about 1,500 faculty members which description of diversity statements more closely aligned with their view: “a justifiable requirement for a job at a university” or “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” Half of respondents endorsed the first option, and half identified with the second.

    Colleges often require or request diversity statements as part of applications for faculty jobs; candidates typically must explain how they have contributed to supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion in their academic careers. Supporters say the statements can help increase faculty diversity, ensure that the extra service work done by scholars of color — often called “invisible labor” — is recognized, and assist institutions in hiring professors who are ready to work with a diverse student population. Critics say the statements force academics to agree with progressive beliefs.

    Political ideology influences faculty members’ views on mandatory DEI statements, according to the FIRE survey results. Three-fourths of liberal faculty said they were a justifiable requirement, while 56 percent of moderate faculty and 90 percent of conservative faculty considered them an ideological litmus test.

    While politics is a factor, it’s not the only driver, said Nathan Honeycutt, a research fellow at FIRE who helped author a report on the survey results. While there’s a narrative that most professors support diversity statements, Honeycutt said, some faculty might be afraid to share their real opinions on the statements publicly.

    “Given the context and the conversations we hear surrounding DEI, it seems like many faculty are on board,” he said. “That’s why so many universities are instituting these things, but as the numbers from our study suggest, it’s even hotly contested among faculty.”

    As the use of DEI statements has become increasingly common among colleges over the past five years, the debate about them has become more heated. Some states, including Utah, West Virginia, Florida, and Texas have introduced legislation in the last two months that would ban mandatory DEI statements.

    FIRE has publicly opposed DEI statements. The organization released model legislation aimed at banning such requirements on February 16.

    The report noted that FIRE’s involvement with the faculty survey could have affected the results. Faculty members who identified as conservative made up 26 percent of respondents and thus were slightly overrepresented in the sample compared to other recent faculty surveys, according to the report. The survey was designed by FIRE and conducted by a market-research firm; faculty respondents came equally from a FIRE database and an education consulting firm’s database. The 1,500 professors all worked at four-year public and private colleges. The survey was conducted from July to August 2022.

    The survey also found that 52 percent of faculty are afraid of losing their jobs or reputation due to a misunderstanding of their words or actions, their words or actions being taken out of context, or something from their past being posted online.

    Honeycutt said it’s disheartening that faculty are so scared of losing their jobs, since academics should be able to study and discuss any topic. He worried that faculty members’ job-security fears could chill the advancement of research, with scholars afraid to challenge the established canon.

    “We seem to have a climate today which is also reflected in the data, where a lot of faculty don’t feel comfortable speaking up about things,” he said.

    The survey also asked faculty members whether they would support a college conducting a formal investigation into a professor, based on several hypothetical scenarios. Thirty-six percent of respondents said they’d support an investigation if a professor told a class that “all white people are racist.” Twenty percent said they’d support an investigation if a professor told a class that “it’s racist to say that all white people are racist.”

    Honeycutt said he hopes faculty who feel they have to self-censor their work realize they aren’t alone after reading the report.

    “We really need courageous faculty, faculty who can dissent even when it might be uncomfortable, who can ask difficult questions, who can confront those who are censoring others, or who have the courage to publicly support colleagues who are speaking up,” he said.

    Kate Marijolovic

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  • ‘Never Seen Anything Like It’: New Bill Would Write DeSantis’s Higher-Ed Vision Into Law

    ‘Never Seen Anything Like It’: New Bill Would Write DeSantis’s Higher-Ed Vision Into Law

    In recent months, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, has laid out a comprehensive vision that would place public higher education under extraordinary state control. A bill introduced this week would write that vision into law.

    House Bill 999 takes up almost every bullet-pointed goal that DeSantis included for public higher education in a press release last month. It would prohibit public colleges from funding any projects that “espouse diversity, equity, and inclusion or Critical Race Theory rhetoric,” no matter the funding source; allow boards of trustees to conduct a post-tenure review of faculty members at any time for cause; and put faculty hiring into the hands of trustees. It also has new specifics DeSantis hadn’t proposed, such as a ban on gender studies as a major or minor.

    “This bill will be a gut punch to anyone who cares about public education in a democracy or academic freedom or the fact that our system of higher education is the envy of the world,” said Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors. “Because higher ed in America is organized around the fact that research and teaching and decisions involving research and teaching are best made by experts and scholars in the field.”

    “We need to protest, we need to vote, we need to make our voices heard,” Mulvey added, acknowledging a student protest on Thursday. “I’ve never seen anything like it. The future of higher education is at stake. If it works in Florida, you know it’ll spread to other red states.”

    In a news conference in January, DeSantis said his proposals would help Florida “continue to lead in the area of higher education,” and the governor has expressed a desire to rein in public spending on campus initiatives related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Neither DeSantis nor Robert Alexander “Alex” Andrade, HB 999’s sponsor, returned requests for comment.

    The bill is very early in the legislative process. Andrade, a Republican representative in the Florida House who has filed other bills closely aligned with DeSantis’s agenda, filed HB 999 on Tuesday, and the legislative session doesn’t start until March 7. HB 999 may yet change before it passes, if it passes at all, but at least one politics expert in Florida saw it as a sign of what’s to come.

    “My hope is that we get at least some of the more alarming things that are in these bills toned down a little bit, but, at the same time, I think there’s definitely a lot of momentum among Florida Republicans to do something here,” said Nicholas R. Seabrook, a professor of political science at the University of North Florida who has been critical of DeSantis’s posture on higher ed. “We’re definitely going to see something come out of this legislative session.”

    Although he expects legal challenges to HB 999 if it passes, Seabrook also thought it could better pass legal muster than last year’s “Stop WOKE” Act, which has its higher-ed portions under injunction. HB 999 takes aim at funding for programs, curriculum, and hiring, issues in which the state “legitimately has a greater role,” Seabrook said.

    Among the specifics of the bill: It directs trustees to remove from their universities majors and minors “in Critical Race Theory, Gender Studies, or Intersectionality, or any derivative major or minor of these belief systems.” It’s not clear whether any public Florida university has a critical race theory or intersectionality major or minor, but a majority of the 12 institutions offer gender studies as either a major or a minor or both.

    (Critical race theory refers to a set of ideas that arose from legal scholars decades ago that, among other things, positions racism as a structural force. Intersectionality is a theory that refers to “the idea that forms of prejudice overlap.” Both resist simple definition.)

    HB 999 would make boards of trustees responsible for hiring faculty members, and while it would allow boards to delegate that task to the college president, it prohibits the president from further delegating hiring to, say, faculty members. It clarifies that while “diversity” programs are banned, that doesn’t include support for “military veterans, Pell Grant recipients, first generation college students, nontraditional students, ‘2+2’ transfer students from the Florida College System, students from low-income families, or students with unique abilities.”

    The bill would create new rules around general-education courses. For example, they may not teach “American history as contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” It continues: “Whenever applicable,” gen-ed courses are to “promote the philosophical underpinnings of Western civilization and include studies of this nation’s historical documents, including the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments thereto, and the Federalist Papers.”

    But teaching history well does include some realities that are contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, according to James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, who has written books about 20th-century African American history. Inviting students to wrestle with colonialism and slavery in early American history is both truthful and helps with “students learning how to think historically and students learning how no ideas exist outside of context. Their ideas, their parents’ ideas, their teachers’ ideas, no ideas exist outside of a context,” Grossman said.

    There are some parts of HB 999 that Seabrook, the University of North Florida professor, agrees with. The bill adds language to Florida law about how a part of public universities’ mission is to prepare students “for citizenship of the constitutional republic.” He also thinks colleges could do more to foster intellectual diversity on campus, but HB 999 is not the way to go about it.

    “It’s identifying that there’s perhaps a problem with academia leaning one way on the ideological spectrum, and then you see what they’re doing at New College,” he said. “They’re just replacing it with an even worse model that goes in the opposite direction.”

    Francie Diep

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  • DeSantis’s Higher-Ed Push Just Got Bigger. Fresh Resistance Is Starting to Bubble Up.

    DeSantis’s Higher-Ed Push Just Got Bigger. Fresh Resistance Is Starting to Bubble Up.

    Standing at a podium labeled “Higher Education Reform,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida on Tuesday announced a wide-ranging plan to shake up the state’s colleges. The plan includes a Western-civilizations-based core curriculum; greater authority for boards and college presidents to hire and fire even tenured faculty members; and other proposals that would, if enacted, encroach on the autonomy of the state’s public colleges.

    We are going to “eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida.”

    “We’re centering higher education on integrity of the academics, excellence, pursuit of truth, teaching kids to think for themselves, not trying to impose an orthodoxy,” DeSantis said during a news conference to announce the plan.

    “It’s re-establishing public control and public authority over the public universities,” Christopher F. Rufo, a conservative activist whom DeSantis recently appointed to one Florida college’s board, said during the same conference.

    DeSantis’s proposed higher-ed legislative package adds to his already aggressive posture toward higher education, which he has escalated in the new year. His actions in recent weeks, coupled with Tuesday’s announcement, stake out an expansive vision for state intervention at public colleges. If realized, it would leave few areas of the enterprise untouched by government regulation or scrutiny.

    Meanwhile, evidence of resistance is arising at at least one university after a month during which Florida’s Republican leaders suggested they might strip public campuses of their diversity efforts, curriculum on certain topics such as critical race theory, and health care for transgender students.

    DeSantis’s proposals include requiring that students at the colleges take certain core courses “grounded in actual history, the actual philosophy that has shaped Western civilization.” He also wants to allow certain recently established research centers at Florida International University, Florida State University, and the University of Florida to operate more independently. The centers were modeled after Princeton University’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, DeSantis said, and he wants at least two of them to create K-12 curricula.

    Last year, the state passed a bill that allowed Florida’s Board of Governors to require professors to go through post-tenure review every five years. On Tuesday, DeSantis proposed giving college presidents more power over faculty hiring and allowing presidents and boards of trustees to call for a post-tenure review of a faculty member “at any time with cause.”

    The governor said he would recommend the legislature set aside $100 million for the state universities to hire and retain faculty members. He recommended $15 million for recruiting students and faculty members to the New College of Florida, a small, public liberal-arts college whose governing board DeSantis recently overhauled with the appointment of six new members. One of the new trustees then wrote that he intended to see if it would be legally possible to fire everyone at the college and rehire only “those faculty, staff, and administration who fit in the new financial and business model.”

    “We are also going to eliminate all DEI and CRT bureaucracies in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said without specifying what “DEI and CRT bureaucracies” were. “No funding, and that will wither on the vine.”

    DeSantis presented eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion projects as a way of saving wasted money, although a previous Chronicle analysis found that such projects make up 1 percent or less of the state universities’ budgets.

    Some evidence of fresh opposition to DeSantis’s broader agenda is emerging on Florida campuses.

    Last week, faculty-union leaders at four Florida universities criticized the governor’s recent maneuvers in a press release put out by the United Faculty of Florida, the umbrella union organization. DEI policies, programs, and courses help make campuses a place where everyone belongs, Liz Brown, president of the University of North Florida chapter, said in the release. “Because of the escalating attacks on these programs,” she said, “our best and brightest students are approaching faculty and asking if the classes they have elected to take will be canceled.”

    In January, Paul Renner, Florida’s Republican House Speaker, asked Florida colleges for a laundry list of DEI-related documents, including communications to or from DEI faculty committees regarding various topics. Renner defined communications expansively as “all written or electronic communications, including but not limited to emails, text messages, and social-media messages.”

    On Monday, the United Faculty of Florida told Florida Atlantic University’s interim provost that, in an attempt to comply with Renner’s directive, the university has asked some faculty members to turn over materials that go beyond the House speaker’s scope. FAU has also caused “confusion and panic” by telling professors that, “All records related to university business are public records, even if they are transmitted through personal devices, personal emails, or personal social-media accounts,” Cami Acceus, a UFF staff member, wrote to Michele Hawkins, the interim provost, in a letter obtained by The Chronicle.

    The applicable standard is not whether communications are “loosely, tangentially, or even closely related to university business,” Acceus wrote. It’s if those communications actually “transact” FAU business. She cited Florida statute and the state attorney general’s “Government-in-the-Sunshine” manual.

    Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.

    “Understandably, FAU has an interest in protecting itself from legislative attacks and may even fear retribution if it does not respond zealously to the House,” Acceus said. “For these reasons, the university has cast its net wide to err on the side of overproducing records to the House of Representatives. Yet, it is not fair or just to faculty when FAU intrudes into their private lives, going beyond the scope of the record request at issue.”

    FAU must do a number of things to dispel the “hysteria” it has caused, Acceus wrote, including telling professors that the university is not seeking their personal communications “beyond the parameters articulated above.”

    The union is prepared to take legal action to prevent FAU from accessing faculty members’ personal information and documents in a way that’s prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, Acceus wrote.

    Hawkins did not reply to a request for comment from The Chronicle.

    Florida Atlantic’s faculty senate also adopted a full-throated defense of DEI efforts. These programs “are not the product of a ‘woke’ ideology,” reads the statement. Rather, “DEI is a student-success strategy. Moreover, it is a strategy that responds to student demand and expectation.” The document urges Florida’s elected leaders to “realize the damage these mischaracterizations and scare tactics” have wrought, both to the reputation of state institutions and to the morale of its educators. It calls on donors, business leaders, alumni, and citizens for their support.

    “Our message is clear: Education is too important to our students, to the people of Florida, and to the future of our nation to be put at risk by political whim.”

    The broad effort to expose diversity spending at the state’s universities is a marked shift. In October 2020, the state university system’s chancellor at the time co-authored a memo laying out the governing board’s commitments to DEI and its expectations that its universities would support that work. For one thing, the importance of having a senior-level university administrator who leads DEI-efforts “cannot be overstated,” says the memo. For another, universities should consider integrating DEI best practices into their curriculum, when appropriate.

    “Work on diversity, equity, and inclusion as strategic priorities must not be a ‘check the box and move on’ activity,” reads the memo. “To produce meaningful and sustainable outcomes, this challenging work will need to continue long after our urgent responses to the crises of 2020 are completed.”

    In an email on Tuesday, Michael V. Martin, president of Florida Gulf Coast University, told The Chronicle, “We intend to continue to follow that directive.”

    Francie Diep and Emma Pettit

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  • How Heterodox Academy Hopes to Change the Campus Conversation

    How Heterodox Academy Hopes to Change the Campus Conversation

    Heterodox Academy is starting a new program that will provide support for a network of groups on college campuses to further the organization’s mission of promoting “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” The first 23 campuses in the program, called Campus Communities, will receive funding over the next three years to host events and bring in speakers with the goal of affecting “campus culture and policy.”

    What exactly that means, and what influence those groups will have, remains to be seen, but the program is an attempt by Heterodox to exert its influence at a more grass-roots level. Founded in 2015, Heterodox — which now has more than 5,000 members, including professors, educators, administrators, and students — began as a response to what its founders saw as a growing tendency on campuses to quash dissent and shy away from controversial topics. In the years since, the conversation about how to navigate potentially offensive topics — and how to balance the concerns of students with a commitment to academic freedom — has, if anything, only become more combustible.

    One of Heterodox’s co-founders, Jonathan Haidt, detailed what he believes is the sorry state of American higher education at a much-talked-about Stanford conference on academic freedom last November. Haidt told those assembled that presidents have in recent years endeavored to “convert the university over from a truth-seeking institution to a social justice institution.” He pointed to how readily some administrators have acceded to student demands to have, say, a professor fired or a course cancelled. Haidt, who is chairman of Heterodox’s board of directors, also referred to the organization’s new program: “We’ll be working a lot more on campuses and helping our members to create groups that will directly influence policy.”

    If you’re a college administrator, that might be cause for worry. Do you really want another organization complaining about your policies and actions? But John Tomasi, who became the first president of Heterodox last year after a quarter-century as a political philosopher at Brown University, sees the mission of Campus Communities as more collaborative than confrontational. “We’re not critics who are from the outside. We’re insiders who love our universities and are trying to make them better,” he told me. “Our mission is to improve the culture of teaching and research, and I think to improve that culture, you really need to be working on the campuses where that culture exists.”

    Michael Regnier, who took over as Heterodox’s executive director in August, hopes Campus Communities will provide a better model for dealing with the inevitable conflicts that arise at any college. “We can show what disagreement in constructive ways can look like, and then hopefully that can be the new normal,” Regnier says. “I think so many people in academia are tired of shout-downs and other kinds of efforts to stop expression instead of engaging with it.”

    The Johns Hopkins University is among the campuses that will host a Campus Communities group in this initial phase. One of the leaders of that group, Dylan Selterman, an associate professor of psychology, notes that Johns Hopkins did poorly on the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s free speech rating (its current rating is yellow, which means it has a policy that “too easily encourages administrative abuse.”) Selterman, who describes himself politically as “very left of center,” says he’s concerned about the anxieties some students have about expressing themselves. “The goal is diversity of thought,” he says. “I hope that it will be received as ‘Oh, this is a place that is receptive to my needs and concerns and includes me in the conversation.’” Selterman wants to hear from students and faculty members to see what their concerns are, to determine if there are common threads, and then to “translate those into things that are actionable.”

    The mission, as Regnier sees it, is to nudge higher education in a direction that’s more tolerant of opposing views, less quick to condemn others, and more willing to embrace difficult conversations: “I think it opens up an opportunity to do some course correction, because the faculty, the students, and sometimes the leadership all agree that the status quo of walking on eggshells is not really serving the university’s purpose.”

    Tom Bartlett

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  • A Florida University Is Quickly Assembling a List of Courses on Diversity. Why? DeSantis Asked.

    A Florida University Is Quickly Assembling a List of Courses on Diversity. Why? DeSantis Asked.

    At least one Florida university has been asked to report its “expenditure of state resources” on programs and courses related to critical race theory and to diversity, equity, and inclusion, at the behest of Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Republican governor, according to an email obtained by The Chronicle. The move is likely to heighten fears among advocates of academic freedom in the state who worry that DeSantis is bent on curtailing professors’ speech in the classroom.

    On December 29, Karen S. Cousins, the associate vice president of strategy and implementation in the provost’s office at the University of North Florida, emailed UNF deans with the subject line: “URGENT / New requirement from the Governor.” That same day, Cousins wrote, Moez Limayem, UNF’s president, had received an email from Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System of Florida. Rodrigues’s email included a memo from DeSantis’s executive office along with an “activity survey form.”

    Cousins seemed to quote from the memo, writing that it is “a request for information ‘regarding the expenditure of state resources on programs and initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory within our state colleges and universities.’

    The request pertains to all programs and initiatives, including ‘academic instruction.’”

    Cousins requested that the deans communicate with their associate deans and department chairs to identify the courses within their colleges that “contain DEI and/or CRT components.” She instructed them to include the course name and number, the number of credit hours, and the instructor of record and that person’s rank, along with other information. (She noted that the instructor’s name would not be included on the survey form.)

    “We’re truly sorry to share this with you during Winter Break,” Cousins wrote. “However, as you know, UNF’s timely compliance is not optional.” UNF’s deadline to provide this information to the chancellor is January 10, she wrote.

    Neither Cousins nor spokespersons at the University of North Florida responded to Tuesday evening emails from The Chronicle.

    DeSantis’s memo comes at a politically tense time in Florida higher ed, as many professors view the governor as a hostile figure who is invested in restricting their ability to teach freely. Like other Republican politicians, DeSantis has railed against critical race theory, which he has called “crap,” and against supposed leftist indoctrination in education. He championed the “Stop WOKE Act,” which aims to restrict how certain topics related to race can be taught. He branded the legislation in the news release as the strongest of its kind in the nation and said, “We won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.” (A federal judge in November blocked the public college system from enforcing the law.)

    A Tuesday evening email to a DeSantis spokesperson was not returned. Beginning his second term as governor, DeSantis in his inaugural address Tuesday pledged to “ensure that our institutions of higher learning are focused on academic excellence and the pursuit of truth, not the imposition of trendy ideology.”

    Emma Pettit

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  • Channeling Orwell, Judge Blasts Florida’s ‘Dystopian’ Ban on ‘Woke’ Instruction

    Channeling Orwell, Judge Blasts Florida’s ‘Dystopian’ Ban on ‘Woke’ Instruction

    After his decisive victory in the Florida governor’s race last week, Ron DeSantis dubbed the Sunshine State as the place “where ‘woke’ goes to die.” But a federal judge on Thursday pushed back against that notion, blocking the State University System of Florida from enforcing through regulation a new law that puts strict limits on what professors can teach or say about race in the classroom.

    In a searing 139-page order, Judge Mark E. Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida cast as Orwellian the state’s defense of the Individual Freedom Act, also known as the “Stop WOKE” Act. The order comes in response to litigation from university professors and college students, who have argued that provisions of the law prohibiting the expression of certain viewpoints, such as those related to sex and race, are unconstitutional. Defending the law, the State University System has argued that public university professors do not have free speech rights when it comes to what they teach. In his order, Walker took strong exception to that argument.

    “Defendants argue that, under this Act, professors enjoy ‘academic freedom’ so long as they express only those viewpoints of which the State approves,” Walker wrote. “This is positively dystopian.”

    Walker, who was nominated to the bench in 2012 by President Barack Obama, is known for his rhetorical flourishes. In the opening line of his order, granting in part a preliminary injunction to the plaintiffs, the federal judge quoted from George Orwell’s 1984. “‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’” Walker wrote, “and the powers in charge of Florida’s public university system have declared the State has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’”

    Under the Individual Freedom Act, professors are prohibited from “training or instruction that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels … student[s] or employee[s] to believe” eight specified concepts. Among others, those concepts include promoting a belief that “A person, by virtue of his or her race, color, national origin, or sex is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

    Florida’s law is part of a broader conservative pushback against “woke” liberalism and critical race theory in colleges and schools. DeSantis, who is widely expected to be a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, has made these issues central to his political identity. As governor, DeSantis is empowered to appoint most members of the state’s Board of Governors, the systemwide university governing body. Under the law, it falls to the board to ferret out unchecked “wokeness” and enforce prohibitions against it. (Violations of the law could result in forfeiture of performance-based funding from the state.)

    Walker’s order, however, enjoins the board from enforcing its regulation. Jerry C. Edwards, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, who represented some of the plaintiffs, said the order sent a strong signal to public colleges and the Legislature.

    “We are very happy with this ruling,” he said. “Judge Walker enjoined the Florida Board of Governors from being able to enforce this law, which he called ‘positively dystopian.’ And we totally agree that it is positively dystopian, violates the First Amendment, and is unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

    A spokeswoman for the Board of Governors said in an email that the board had “no comment, as it is our policy not to comment on pending litigation.”

    This is at least the second case this year in which Walker has written a strong order related to First Amendment issues at public universities. In January he issued a blistering order against the University of Florida, saying it could not enforce a policy that had blocked university professors from participating in litigation against the state.

    Walker’s order on Thursday took strong umbrage at what the judge characterized as a troubling notion that the state can ban speech it does not like.

    “Defendants respond that the First Amendment offers no protection here,” Walker wrote. “They argue that because university professors are public employees, they are simply the State’s mouthpieces in university classrooms. As a result, Defendants claim, the State has unfettered authority to limit what professors may say in class, even at the university level. According to Defendants, so long as professors work for the State, they must all read from the same music.”

    Edwards, the ACLU lawyer, said Walker’s two orders signal a judicial check on efforts to encroach on professors’ speech rights. “What this ruling and the other ruling says is that the State of Florida has not been good about protecting free-speech rights on college campuses and promoting free speech on college campuses, and that the courts aren’t having it,” Edwards said. “They are pushing back and saying you need to respect the First Amendment. You need to respect academic freedom.”

    Jack Stripling

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