In regards to the diversity education bill I came across this bill as well. Let me know what you think.
'Intellectual diversity' bill nixed
Legislation was aimed at public universities
RICHMOND - Legislation to promote “intellectual diversity” in Virginia’s four-year public universities was “gently laid on the table,” or softly dispatched Tuesday evening in a House of Delegates subcommittee.
The higher education subcommittee also killed on an 8-0 vote a bill that would have limited state universities to admitting no more than 25 percent of their students from out of state.
That measure, sponsored by Del. Timothy D. Hugo, R-Centreville, had an estimated fiscal impact of $53 million a year in lost out-of-state tuition, including at least $18 million at the University of Virginia, which takes 32 percent of its students from outside Virginia. The “intellectual diversity” bill prompted an hour-long debate. University professors denounced House Bill 1643, sponsored by Del. R. Steven Landes, R-Weyers Cave, as a conservative attack on academic freedom. Conservative college students defended the bill as a bid to counter liberal professors who promote only their political points of view.
Landes said his bill was revised and merely “a shadow of its former self” that sought to have universities report on their policies once every two years about “maintaining a balance of viewpoints being heard on both sides.”
“Hopefully, our universities are trying to maintain and to bring in people who have different viewpoints,” Landes said before a House higher education subcommittee recommended against moving his bill forward by a 5-3 vote.
While Landes called his measure a simple request for the reporting of each university’s policies to promote intellectual diversity and the free flow of ideas, opponents said the use of the term coined by conservatives made it a political initiative aimed at liberal faculty.
“It is used primarily for political purposes,” said Bob Whitehead, executive director of the Virginia Education Association. “I do not believe that there is any necessity to institute a new concept. … Protect academic freedom and please delete ‘intellectual diversity.’”
Conservative students and other supporters said the bill would promote the free flow of ideas at universities where conservative students feel their ideas and principles are not given equal time or weight.
Jarrett R. Ray, chairman of the College Republican Federation of Virginia, said his experience as a James Madison University student included a class in which a writing professor gave him lower marks for writing several papers from a conservative point of view.
“I am an avowed conservative,” Ray said. When he wrote another paper with a conscious effort to make it “bipartisan” and “more liberal,” the same professor gave him an A, he said. Ray said the professor did not have his contract renewed after telling an ROTC student that the American military was “killing babies in Iraq.”
Anne D. Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, said her group had polled students at top universities and found nearly half reported one-sided discussions as well as having professors who frequently interject their own political comments even when they have nothing to do with the subject being taught.
But college professors called “intellectual diversity” a loaded and largely undefined term wielded by conservative political groups to limit academic freedom.
“That will be something of a Trojan horse for introducing other kinds of intrusive recommendations, requirements that institutions begin to measure balance in classrooms and hiring and the like,” said Brian Turner, president of the Virginia Conference of the American Association of University Professors.
“Academic freedom is a core principle of higher education,” said Turner, a political science professor at Randolph-Macon College. “It is the common law of higher education” and the freedoms are held individually.
“Intellectual diversity is a new phrase invented by actors, most of whom are outside of higher education,” Turner said. “It refers to political and ideological viewpoints presumably held by faculty or promoted in classrooms or presented by outside speakers on campus or put forward in course syllabi. Diversity would be measured at the level of the university, not the individual.”
Landes has the option of trying to revive his measure in the full House Education Committee today.
