Conservative State Lawmakers Take Aim at One of Higher Education’s Holy Grails

Given the pervasive Leftism in universities, tenure is more likely to be needed to protect conservative academics rather than Leftist ones, so abolishing it would be a foot-shoot for conservative lawmakers

When the lieutenant governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, asked Texas colleges to disavow critical race theory, the University of Texas faculty approved a resolution defending their freedom to decide for themselves how to teach about race. Mr. Patrick said he took it as a message to “go to hell.”

In turn, Mr. Patrick, a Republican, said it was time to consider holding the faculty accountable, by targeting one of the top perks of their jobs. “Maybe we need to look at tenure,” Patrick said at a news conference in November.

It’s a sentiment being echoed by conservative officials in red states across the country. The indefinite academic appointments that come with tenure — the holy grail of university employment — have faced review from lawmakers or state oversight boards in at least half a dozen states, often presented as bids to rein in academics with liberal views.

Tenure advocates are bracing for the possibility of new threats as lawmakers return to statehouses around the country.

The trend reflects how conservative scrutiny of instruction related to race, gender, and sexuality has extended from schools to higher education. Budget considerations also play a role. Tenured faculty numbers have been declining even in more liberal states. Universities are hiring more part-time, adjunct instructors amid declines in financial support from state governments.

Traditionally, tenured professors can be terminated only under extreme circumstances, such as professional misconduct or a financial emergency. Advocates for tenure say it is a crucial component of academic freedom — especially as controversy grows over scholarly discussions about history and identity.

Without tenure, faculty are “liable to play it safe when it comes time to have a classroom discussion about a difficult topic,” the president of the American Association of University Professors, Irene Mulvey, said.

Yet in difficult financial and political times, even tenured professors may not be guaranteed employment.

In Kansas, Emporia State University this fall cut 33 faculty — most of them tenured — using an emergency pandemic measure that allowed universities to bypass policies on staff terminations to balance budgets.

Emporia State’s sole journalism professor, Max McCoy, penned a column that began, “I may be fired for writing this” — before learning this would be his last year teaching at the school. “This is a purge,” he said. He said all the fired professors were “Democrats or liberal in our thinking.”

The university spokeswoman, Gwen Larson, said individual professors were not targeted for dismissal. She said the cuts followed a review of how demand for academic programs is changing and “where we needed to move in the future.”

Attacks on higher education have been fueled by a shift in how conservatives see colleges and universities, Jeremy Young of the free-expression group PEN America said. The share of Republicans and independent-leaning Republicans who said higher education was having a negative effect on the country grew to 59 percent from 37 percent between 2015 and 2019 in Pew Research Center polling.

In Texas, university administrators are working behind the scenes to squash anticipated legislation that would target tenure, fearful it will hurt recruitment, the president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, Jeff Blodgett, said.

Some people already aren’t applying for university jobs because of the discussions, the president of the Texas Faculty Association, Pat Heintzelman, said.

In Florida, a federal judge in November blocked the "Stop-WOKE" Act, a law pushed by Governor DeSantis that restricts certain race-based conversations and analysis in colleges. The governor’s office is appealing the injunction. Compliance with the law would be part of the criteria for evaluating tenured professors under a review process that the university system’s board of governors is weighing.

Mr. DeSantis has questioned the argument that tenure provides academic freedom. “If anything, it’s created more of an intellectual orthodoxy where people that have dissenting views, it’s harder for them to be tenured in the first place,” he said at a news conference in April.

In Louisiana, lawmakers set up a task force to study tenure with the Republican-backed resolution noting that students should be confident that courses are free of “political, ideological, religious, or antireligious indoctrination.” Professors raised concerns until they learned the task force’s members were mostly tenure supporters.

In Georgia, the state’s board of regents approved a policy that made it easier to remove tenured faculty who have had a negative performance review. Elsewhere, legislation to ban or restrict tenure also has been introduced in recent years in Iowa, South Carolina, and Mississippi, but failed to win passage.

The pushback follows decades of declining rates of tenured faculty. According to the AAUP, 24 percent of faculty members held full-time tenured appointments in fall 2020, compared with 39 percent in fall 1987, the first year for which directly comparable information is available.

Part-time college instructors rarely receive benefits. They frequently must travel from campus to campus to cobble together a living.

“It’s a nightmare,” Caprice Lawless, who wrote the “Adjunct Cookbook,” replete with recipes that poorly compensated Ph.D.s can cobble together with food pantry staples, said.

“I’ve taken Ph.D.s to foodbanks and watched them cry because they can’t get enough food for their family,” Ms. Lawless said, adding that she served as a social worker of sorts before retiring two years ago from Front Range Community College at Westminster, Colorado.

The opposition to tenure has united conservatives for different reasons: Not all share the same concerns about “woke higher education,” a San Francisco State University history professor who has written about the shift to part-time faculty, Marc Stein, said.

“But,” he said, “if you attack the ‘wokeness’ of higher education and that leads to declining funding for higher education, then economic conservatives are happy.”

Tenure exploded after World War II when it helped with recruitment as the GI Bill sent enrollment soaring, a former provost of Tufts University who has written on the issue, Sol Gittleman, said. Lately, the country has overproduced Ph.D.s, Mr. Gittleman said. He predicts tenure will largely disappear in the coming decades outside the top 100 colleges and universities.

“Critical race theory — that’s an excuse,” he said. “If there was a shortage of faculty, you wouldn’t hear that.”

https://www.nysun.com/article/conservative-state-lawmakers-take-aim-at-one-of-higher-educations-holy-grails

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Red States Need to Stop Letting Academia Flip Us Off

The beauty of federalism is that, in some states, we patriots are nominally in charge. Places like California, New York, and Massachusetts are communist hellholes, and they remain communist hellholes because the communists in charge of those hellholes demand policies that ensure the perpetuation of their communist hellholedom.

But good gravy, why are so many red states where we conservatives have the governor’s mansion and the legislature, and therefore the car keys to floor it on conservative policy, so damn spineless that we refuse to carve out the tumors of communist hellholedom that threaten to metastasize throughout our red paradises?

There are many such infested institutions, but let us focus on one of the most visible and most deadly to society because it infects and poisons the young people who will take leadership roles in society down the road (that they primarily come from colleges yet another problem). The fact is, even in red states that should damn well know better, state colleges and universities not only indoctrinate students in CRT garbage but actually build DIE infrastructures that perpetuate wokedom and crush the students who yearn to breathe and learn freely. We could stop it with a snap of our collective fingers, yet for some reason, Republicans seem terrified at the thought of offending the ragged collection of man-bunned TAs, tweed-jacketed dorks, craven, cat-fancying administrators, and daddy issue-smitten purple-haired co-eds who seem to run our colleges.

Our colleges. Ours. We, taxpayers, built them. We, taxpayers, pay for them. We, taxpayers, should dictate how they function. Why won’t we?

First of all, “we” does not include Ron DeSantis. The guy on the cutting edge of crushing CRT just gave all the public colleges in Florida a short fuse to report on their woke web of organizations and activities. The university eunuchs freaked, of course, claiming that this was just a first step toward wiping the slate clean on the government-funded woke fascism plaguing Sunshine State academia. Why diversity consultants may be fired, conformity enforcement teams curtailed, and kangaroo courts adjourned!

Yeah. Exactly. He’s going to destroy their dreams. It will be beautiful.

They should look on the bright side and celebrate the glory that is Our Democracy in action. We were told – by them and their allies endlessly over the last couple of years – that Our Democracy is facing the most perilous of perils. No longer! Heavy D ran on a platform of nuking woke and he’s simply giving the people what they wanted by about 20 percentage points.

So, why do they hate Our Democracy? Basically, if you don’t want him and his legislators to decree the policies the people have demanded – that not one red cent gets spent on this racist commie nonsense – then you are an insurrectionist of treason who hates America.

Oh wait, they are totally into that last part.

The Governor of the Falling Frozen Iguana State is also replacing the board of trustees of a super-liberal public college with people who don’t hate normal Americans, and that has the freakshow fuming. As regime media outlet Yahoo News put it, “DeSantis takes aim at Sarasota's New College, transforms board in conservative overhaul.” He sure did! His new trustees include CRTslayer Christopher Ruto and a Hillsdale College professor. The pinkos are most perturbed at the thought of classes that teach actual history, actual literature, and actual knowledge instead of woke intersectional mind goo. And too bad for them – there’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

So where are the other red governors on this? Why is Greg Abbott not taking a break from failing to use his cops and soldiers to secure the Texas border and demanding his legislature defund the police haters, as well as the rest of the motley crew that controls Lone Star academia? The joke in Texas is that UT is Berkeley with BBQ, but why should that be? Ban all CRT crap, fire all the diversitycrats, mandate that all administrator ranks be slashed, and require that all faculty hiring include proportionate numbers of patriots, believers, veterans, and people who have actually had real jobs. After all, these are our states and there is no good reason we should be subsidizing the efforts of people who hate us to enslave us.

But, of course, soft Republicans resist imposing their iron discipline on academia. Why? Well, one reason is that the regime media will call them mean and they don’t like that. Or worse, the regime media will say they hate education. But they should hate education, at least the brand being foisted on our young people today. It’s not education. It’s a joke. There are zero excuses for a guy who sweats it out on an oil rig in the Permian Basin wringing oil out of the dirt under the blazing sun getting dunned by the state for tax money that then goes to underwrite some nose-pierced princess’s degree in Marxist puppetry. Or Marxist interpretive dance. Or anything Marxist, other than how to stamp out Marxism forever.

These are the RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel GOPers, the ones who just want to go along, get along, and lose (Fire Ronna by going to www.HireHarmeet.com and make your objections known to reelect the O-5 loser to another term).

But mostly, there is also the almost willful refusal of a lot of these Buick Republicans to understand and accept that college today is not like their alma mater of yesteryear. Nostalgia is, after all, a helluva drug. They remember their fraternities and sororities, their gentleman’s C grades, lots of Budweiser, and making out in the bushes around the quad. But that college experience is gone, washed away in a tsunami of political correctness and rigid, surveillance state thought control. They don’t get that the Lamda Lamda Lamdas and Omega Mus are not attending toga parties but mandatory training on microaggressions, their privilege, and the horror of patriarchy. Sure, it’s still fun to watch football, but tailgating before the big game against the University of College is where the similarity to their college years ends. Colleges are no longer campuses creating educated citizens; they are commie conformity factories run on our dime.

This must stop throughout our country, but it must first stop out in the red states. It's a betrayal of the citizens of these states who are expected to pay for it and who want trained workers capable of contributing to society, not destroying it. It’s a betrayal of the few professors who want to teach students instead of converting them into CRT cliché- spewing automatons. And it’s a betrayal of the kids who just want to get a real degree and maybe score a little action without having to get a notarized certificate of consent before rounding second base.

Red state rulers, get on it because Ron DeSantis is again making most of the rest of you look like ineffectual saps.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2023/01/09/red-states-need-to-stop-letting-academia-flip-us-off-n2618008

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Court upholds WV law protecting women’s sports

CHARLESTON, W.V. – A federal district court issued a decision Thursday that upholds West Virginia’s Save Women’s Sports Act, H.B. 3293, rejecting a legal challenge to the law that would have undermined women’s sports in the state by allowing males who identify as female to compete with females in girls’ and women’s sports.

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys represent Lainey Armistead, a former West Virginia State University soccer player who intervened in the lawsuit, B.P.J. v. West Virginia State Board of Education, to defend the law. West Virginia enacted the law to ensure equal opportunities for women in sports.

“Today’s decision is a win for reality. The truth matters, and it is crucial that our laws and policies recognize that the physical differences between men and women matter, especially in a context like sports,” said ADF Senior Counsel Christiana Kiefer. “Female athletes deserve to compete on a level playing field. Allowing males to compete in girls’ sports destroys fair competition, safety on the field, and women’s athletic opportunities. Female athletes across the country are losing medals, podium spots, public recognition, and opportunities to compete because of males competing in women’s sports. The court was right to affirm that West Virginia’s law is not only constitutional, but consistent with Title IX.”

“While some females may be able to outperform some males, it is generally accepted that, on average, males outperform females athletically because of inherent physical differences between the sexes,” the court wrote in its decision. “This is not an overbroad generalization, but rather a general principle that realistically reflects the average physical differences between the sexes. Given [the challenger]’s concession that circulating testosterone in males creates a biological difference in athletic performance, I do not see how I could find that the state’s classification based on biological sex is not substantially related to its interest in providing equal athletic opportunities for females.”

“I believe that protecting fairness in women’s sports is a women’s rights issue,” said Armistead. “This isn’t just about fair play for me: It’s about protecting fairness and safety for female athletes across West Virginia. It’s about ensuring that future generations of female athletes are not discriminated against but have access to the same equal athletic opportunities that shaped my life. Being an athlete in college has made me even more passionate about the sport that I play. I want fairness, equality, and safety in sports. And I want to ensure those standards are protected for other girls, too.”

Timothy D. Ducar, one of more than 3,500 attorneys allied with ADF, is co-counsel for Armistead in the case. Brandon Steele is serving as local counsel.

This case isn’t over yet. There could be an appeal. When the law fails to recognize the biological differences between men and women, it’s women and girls who suffer. In states across the country, they remain unprotected.

Alliance Defending Freedom: info@adflegal.org

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