Intellectual Diversity in Missouri
Thomas C. Reeves, The Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

Many conservatives argue, with considerable evidence, that academia is dominated by intolerant leftists. Most faculty, quite naturally, disagree, arguing that the case for bias has not been made and that efforts to gauge the intellectual content of what they teach are designed to inhibit freedom of thought. The warfare, of course, is part of the Culture War, and blasts from both sides have been especially loud in recent years. In Missouri, a case of religious intolerance by a professor at Missouri State University in 2005 has prompted the state’s House of Representatives to take action. A bill passed earlier this year requires public colleges and universities to report annually on the state of intellectual diversity on their campus. Predictably, an uproar ensued. While the Senate recently failed to take up the matter, the bill deserves careful attention, as similar proposals are in the works in other states.

The incident at Missouri State involved a course assignment in a social work class. The professor asked his students to write letters to state legislators urging them to support legislation permitting same-sex couples to adopt. Emily Brooker, an evangelical Christian majoring in social work, strongly objected. She was then hauled before a faculty committee, facing a charge of discriminating against homosexuals. After Brooker filed a law suit, the university settled, removing the discrimination charge from her record and paying her costs to attend graduate school. An independent investigation of the case by two outside administrators in the same field revealed a “toxic” climate of intellectual “bullying” in the School of Social Work at Missouri State. The investigators recommended closing the School and restarting it with a new faculty.

In response, the Missouri House of Representatives passed the Emily Brooker Intellectual Diversity Act, which would require each of the state’s public colleges to report every year to the legislature on the state of “intellectual diversity” on campus. The bill includes suggestions, not mandates, for items to be covered in the reports, including the existence of speech codes, the ideological balance of outside panelists and speakers, and “diversity-related criteria used in admissions, scholarship awards, and hiring which shall include racial and gender diversity.” The list also included: “intellectual diversity concerns in the institution’s guidelines on teaching and program development and such concerns shall include but not be limited to the protection of religious freedom including the viewpoint that the Bible is inerrant.” This was a plea for the acknowledgement and tolerance of Christian moral standards as well as an appeal to present Creationism as an intellectually respectable option to Darwinian theory. Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors called the bill “one of the worst pieces of higher-education legislation in a century.”

The Missouri bill was drafted, without the lightning rod sentence about Biblical inerrancy, by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. This organization, which has links to the National Association of Scholars, has been drafting similar bills for other states. President Anne D. Neal exclaimed, “For years, the academic establishment has refused to take action to protect the free exchange of ideas. It is no wonder that now, confronted with real problems, Missouri legislators have asked for a measure of accountability.”

Proponents noted correctly that the bill does not limit any activity on campus. It would only require campus administrators to provide taxpayers with detailed information about the degree of academic freedom on campus.

The investigation into the School of Social Work found that students were fearful of expressing views that differed from those held by their professors, especially on spiritual and religious matters. This should not be surprising. A recently published report by the Institute for Jewish and Community Research found that 75 percent of the faculty surveyed declared religion to be unimportant to them, and that 56 percent of faculty in social sciences and humanities departments held unfavorable views of Evangelical Christians. Sociologists Neil Gross and Solon Simmons released another survey of professors earlier this year, revealing that only 35.7 percent of respondents had a strong belief in God. Within the nation’s elite doctoral institutions, 36.6 percent of respondents declared themselves either atheists or agnostics; only 20 percent said they had no doubt about God’s existence. Add to this a mountain of evidence showing that the Left dominates higher education, and you see the problem facing the Missouri legislators. Why should taxpayers shell out millions of dollars a year to subsidize a single point of view most of them find unreasonable, demeaning, and destructive? Education, the bill declares, should be more than indoctrination.

A coalition of academic and civil liberties groups is howling about the Emily Brooker Act, issuing warnings against thought control, divisiveness, and McCarthyism. And yet, if the intellectual climate on campus is in fact free and balanced, and if faculty are chosen and promoted without an ideological litmus test, the campus reports required in the legislation would reflect that reality and could pose no possible threat to anyone. Indeed, a clean bill of health could silent critics and perhaps even inspire legislators to increase financial support. Accountability need not be a subversive activity.
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