Betsy DeVos: Universities Squelch Conservative Students' Free Speech

Newly minted U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told a gathering of conservatives Thursday that faculty members at the nation’s colleges and universities are squelching free speech among students, telling them what to do, say and “more ominously, what to think.” DeVos, the Michigan school choice advocate confirmed earlier this month to lead the Education Department, made the remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland.

“They say if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university community,” DeVos said. “But the real threat is silencing the First Amendment rights of people with whom you disagree.”

DeVos’ remarks are part of a larger conversation taking place across the country about whether professors and other instructors are so overwhelmingly liberal that college and university students are denied a well-rounded education.

A survey by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute showed a dramatic increase in the number of college professors who describe their political ideology as “liberal” or “far left” — to 60 percent in 2014, up from 42 percent in 1990. During the same period, the number of professors identifying as “conservative” and “far right” declined by nearly 6 percent, and the number of “moderate” academics dropped 13 percent.

A group of conservative professors who collectively call themselves the Heterodox Academy recently wrote that students are getting cheated by the political imbalance.

“With relatively few right-leaning voices in the professoriate, particularly in the humanities and the social sciences where ideas matter most, many college students receive less than the intellectually rigorous education [that] they deserve,” they wrote.

Advising conservative-leaning college students attending the gathering in Maryland on how to respond, DeVos encouraged them to persist in making their voices heard, The Detroit News reported.

“Don’t shut up. Keep talking. Keep making your arguments," she said. "You can do so respectfully and with civility, but I think you need to do so with confidence.”

Bills To Achieve Political Diversity

Emboldened by a 2016 presidential election that gave Republicans not only the White House but also majorities in both chambers of Congress and in many state legislatures, the type of reform that DeVos champions already is taking shape.

In Iowa, a Republican state senator introduced a bill that amounts to a hiring freeze on politically liberal professors and instructors at the state’s three Regents institutions to achieve political diversity among the faculty. The bill, which would provide that the percentage of faculty belonging to one political party cannot exceed the percentage of the other by 10 percent, enraged Democrats and education leaders, who said hiring should be based on qualifications, not politics.

But the sponsor, state Sen. Mark Chelgren, told the Des Moines Register that his proposal is in line with existing policies that encourage the hiring of faculty with “different thinking, different processes, different expertise.”

Students “should be able to go to their professors, ask opinions, and they should know publicly whether that professor is a Republican or Democrat or no party affiliation, and therefore they can expect their answers to be given in as honest a way as possible,” Chelgren said.

Democratic State Sen. Herman C. Quirmbach, an associate professor of economics at Iowa State University and a ranking member on the Senate Education Committee, dismissed the bill as “wackadoodle” in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education.

"The notion that we would have some sort of political litmus test in hiring faculty is abhorrent. It is blatant violation of academic freedom," Quirmbach said. "Even the filing of a bill like this will make it that much more difficult for Iowa State, the University of Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa to recruit top faculty."

Similar legislation aimed at achieving ideological balance among faculty at North Carolina’s public universities was dropped Monday. It would have required the universities to hire conservative and liberal faculty members proportionate to the number of registered Republicans and Democrats in Tar Heel state.

Liberal Professor Watch List

There’s even a database called ProfessorWatchlist.org that students can access to choose their instructors on the basis of political ideology. The liberal college database is a project of Turning Point USA, which said it curated the list from news stories “to expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”

The group said it “will continue to fight for free speech and the right of professors to say whatever they wish,” but added that “students, parents and alumni deserve to know the specific incidents and names of professors that advance a radical agenda in lecture halls.”

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