Rescue College Classrooms with the Freedom from Indoctrination Act

In the past few years, conservative policymakers have started to move beyond hand-wringing about ideological capture and propose policy solutions tailored to addressing various manifestations of it. For example, policy thinkers have highlighted that so-called “DEI statements” for faculty hiring and promotion constitute de facto ideological litmus tests, and state legislatures have begun passing bills to eliminate them from state universities.2

With our colleagues at the Manhattan Institute, we at the Goldwater Institute wrote model legislation— recently enacted in Texas—to defund administrative positions dedicated to infusing DEI into various facets of campus life. And with our colleagues at Speech First, we wrote model legislation to eliminate so-called “bias reporting systems,” which serve as speech code-enforcement mechanisms.

Yet conservatives have had a far harder time adequately addressing their most long-standing concern: ideological indoctrination in classrooms. Some conservatives have insisted that academic freedom must remain a sacrosanct first principle and that any effort to influence classroom content is philosophically mis- guided. Conservative policymakers in Florida have proved less reticent and have seen their Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (Stop WOKE) Act enjoined by the courts. And even as that law was enjoined, Florida legislators introduced H.B. 999, which in some ways goes even further, prohibiting entire majors. But we need not frame the issue as a false choice between risking legally questionable legislation and surrendering coursework to ideologues.