New lawsuit names policies at Purdue and Indiana University.
Today, the ACLU of Indiana filed a new lawsuit over SEA 202 – a state law which requires that professors be disciplined, denied tenure, or risk tenure revocation if they fail to “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity” or if they fail to “expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks.” Filed after an earlier lawsuit was dismissed for jurisdictional reasons, this suit names policies of Indiana University and Purdue University that were recently enacted as required by the law.
We believe these policies infringe upon faculty members’ free speech and academic freedom, violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
The law’s vague and sweeping mandates make it impossible for the professors to discern what they are required to do or refrain from doing to avoid being deemed to have failed to “foster” these “cultures” under the Universities’ policies and the Act. And their academic freedom to manage the content and pedagogies of their courses is at the core of the role as professors—a freedom these mandates directly infringe.
Stevie J. Pactor, Staff Attorney, ACLU of Indiana issued the following statement:
As we stated in our initial lawsuit in May, this law puts professors in an impossible situation. One of our plaintiffs has already been the subject of multiple student complaints under the new university policy, all of which were ultimately dismissed. Professors should never be put in the position of choosing between their careers and their academic freedom.
