My Testimony to the Indiana House of Representatives

S.B. 202, Part II

Figure 1: Me Testifying

[See also Part I, and, once it is written, Part III. On Feb. 21, the bill passed the House Education Committee on a 6-4 vote; a few days later, it passed the full House and went to the Governor’s desk (the Senate having accepted the House version). This Part, Part II, has been revised because I misread the non-tenure-track part of the bill. ]

Last Wednesday I went up to Indianapolis for the House of Representatives hearing to give public comment on S.B. 202, a bill trying to address radical marxism in the public universities— DEI (Diversity-equity-and-inclusion), political correctness, suppression of the speech of moderate and conservative students and faculty, political discrimination in hiring, and so forth. The bill recently passed the Indiana Senate (hence, Senate Bill 202) and is under under consideration by the House Education Committee. I substacked about it last week in Part I. What I said then was that S.B. 202 has some good and some bad features, and could be much improved by some simple amendments. In this essay, I won’t go over that again. Instead, I’ll talk about my testimony.

Figure 2: The Democratic Representatives (spectators behind in 3rd row and beyond)

Everybody else was testifying against S.B. 202 and talking about how unnecessary it was, so I discarded my carefully prepared criticisms of the bill and just told horror stories of what universities are like. It went something like this:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the committtee. I’m glad I decided to drive up this morning, because I have kinda different view of things than any of the other witnesses. It’s late and we’re all tired, though,¹ so I thought I’d leave my boring criticisms of the bill to my written testimony, and just tell stories now.²

I’m something of an expert on how universities persecute conservative Christian professors— and liberal professors too; Representative Smith, you probably know Dr. Mark McPhail at IU-Northwest³ and how he was persecuted,⁴ which, by the way, resulted in a lawsuit and a settlement whose dollar cost⁵ it would be interesting to find out.⁶ Well, in 2019 I had a tussle with my Provost and my Dean, who called me reprehensible, sexist, racist, homophobic, vile, stupid, bigoted, and loathsome. And that’s just what they said about me in public. The reason was that on Twitter I’d posted a quote from an article that said, “Geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness.”⁷ By now I’m retired and teaching 7^th grade math-- without a teaching license, I should say,⁸ and teaching some kids who were held back — it worked for these few at least⁹-- and helping foster free speech, most recently writing an amicus brief with Jim Bopp¹⁰ for NetChoice v. Paxton, the case I like to call TechLords v. Texas.

Earlier today, Representative Delaney¹¹ wondered about how the universities could be so leftwing when they were run by a Board of Trustees mainly appointed by Republican governors of Indiana. “Where were the Trustees?” he said. “Who’s stopping them from doing their job?” I can answer that. It’s the low-level bureaucrats. There’s a big distance between the Trustees and the action on the ground, and the Trustees don’t even know most of what’s going on, so they can’t conrol it.

An example is when the Finance Department wanted to hire a couple of new assistant professors. The faculty narrowed it down to six candidates. The administration said they all had to submit DEI statements, which they did. The administration came back saying all six had flunked their DEI statements, but they’d let the department make offers to the two women, since at least they were women.

So there already we see we’re losing faculty candidates for political reasons.¹² This bill would help with that.

Second story. When I was under attack by the administration, a retired professor, one of the best loved teachers, wrote a letter to the editor in my defense. He had been teaching after official retirement just for the love of it. After the letter, he wasn’t invited back.

Something else Representative DeLaney said was that professor didn’t need to teach the arguments for both sides of an issue because students would get diversity across professors. One semester the student would take a political science course from a liberal professor, the next semester he’d take one from a conservative political science professor, so he’d get to hear both sides. But *are* there any conservative political science professors? At Bloomington there are 21— no, 27— poli sci professors, and I can only think of 1 who *might* be conservative. Fellow professors, please correct me if I’m wrong on that. I know that of the 42 professors in the Law School, zero are conservative. There used to be one, but he retired five years ago.¹³

Figure 3: Professor Dan Smith

Another story. Dan Smith testified earlier about how he never saw political bias. But after criticizing homosexuality in 2003, when Dan Smith was my associate dean, I had tiny raises for quite a few years afterwards. Dan’s replacement as associate dean even invited me to meet in her office to see if I was unhappy and might leave.

At that point, the Chairman told me my time was up. I’d done a rather bad job of telling my stories, but at least I went into specifics and showed that the rosy picture everybody else was painting might be totally wrong. The Purdue Exponent said the next day,

Dozens of professors and students from across the state testified against the bill, only one person testified in favor of it.

“In 2019, my provost and dean called me sexist, racist, homophobic, reprehensible, vile and that was just in public,” former IU professor Erik Rassmussen said.¹⁴ That was in response to his tweet saying geniuses were predominantly male with high IQs, low conscientiousness and low agreeability.

“We are losing faculty because of DEI statements and this bill would help with that,” Rassmussen said.

I had more stories I would have told if I’d had enough time. I could have spent a couple of hours and kept people’s interest, I think. Maybe I should do a four-part podcast. Here’s a list:

1. An IU-Bloomington anthropology professor who testified earlier in the hearing said all views were welcome in her classes. But her department says openly, on its public website:

   “We know that the strength of our field is proportional to the inclusivity of our efforts. The statement on race by the American Anthropological Association provides an explanation of how racial constructions came to be and endure and we are aware that we must confront these issues in our teaching and research. A commitment to diversity maintains a distinction between intellectual freedom and intellectual license. Expressions of identity that disrespect or threaten the freedom and safety of others are not acceptable; we seek to overturn incivility by offering education and broadening experiences. As anthropologists we are committed to encouraging active dialogue and interventions to address injustices and inequities and to create an inclusive environment for all.”

   With these people, what you have to commonly do is realize they use the exact opposite of the correct word to describe the nasty things they do. They of course mean that they want to discourage active dialogue and they want to create a hostile environment for all who disagree with them. Only some views are acceptable, and they are going to come down hard on “intellectual license”, which is what non-lefties, as opposed to their down “intellectual freedom”. The dishonesty is staggering.

2. Some of the previous witnesses had talked about the need to prevent students from ganging up on professors whose political views they didn’t like: “mobbing”. This very thing happened to me, at the instigation of the administration and with its active help. The administration issued a call for informants to bring information in about Professor Rasmusen, who surely must have been doing all sorts of harassing and discriminating even though their files contained no complaints about him over the past twenty years. They started a formal investigation and wrote up a report after interviewing 13 anonymous witnesses from my most recent class, which had 25 students. This was after the Provost and Dean had issued public statements to thousands of students condemning me, which was such an encouragement to mobbing that they felt they had to post a campus cop at a desk outside of my office to protect me, and that one night around 1 a.m. some people were incited enough to come to my house and drop fake blood over my doorstep.

3. I could go on and on. There’s the time a colleague threatened to punch me in the face because I said that his proposal to only look at female job candidates was illegal discrimination. He said if I didn’t retract my statement, he’d punch me. I didn’t, but he didn’t punch me. We’re about the same size but I do better research, so maybe he was scared.

4. There’s the tenured professor at a certain public university in Indiana that I can’t name who was fired on the pretext that he was endangering students by some lab activities during the covid scare. The real reason to fire him was that they wanted to downsize the department, and they’d found out he had a chronic medical condition that was going to be expensive for the university. Not political, but an example of an evil administration.

5. Another nonpolitical case is that of Harold Donnelly, a math professor at Purdue. He was old and had stopped doing research, so they wanted to get rid of him, but he had tenure. So the head of the math department faked an investigation into his teaching, said he was incompetent, and reduced his teaching load and his salary to zero, without going through any of the required committees and procedures. “He still has tenure” was the administration’s attitude. The full professors of his department voted 80% that they had no confidence in the head, but she’d been appointed to save on costs, and no doubt had calculated that for the salary of one full professor, even an underpaid one, she could hire two lecturers who would have a higher teaching loud.

6. Ah, and there’s an oldie but goodie. Back a decade or two ago, some of us discovered that a physical education professor (what they now, and maybe even by then, called kinesiology) had turned his p.e. course into a course on how evil Israel was in its treatment of Palestinians. It was actually very funny. We were kind enough to tell the administration privately rather than embarass them (as we ought to have, I think now), and the course was quietly changed, or so we believed.

7. A professor at IU heard from friends at the University of Illinois heard, shortly after he’d written an op-ed and become a Republican precinct committeeman, that the IU Administration was trying, behind his back, to fire him.

But those last stories didn’t get told. Nor did I get to talk about my criticisms of the bill. I’ll show you, though, the notes that I’d typed up and printed out, the notes I discarded to tell stories instead:

1. I’m something of an expert on how universities persecute conservative, Christian, professors, since back in 2019 I had a tussle with Indiana University’s Provost and my Dean, who called me ….By now I’m retired and teaching 7^th grade math-- without a teaching license, I should say, and teaching some kids who were held back--- and doing this and that, most recently teaming up with attorney Jim Bopp to write an amicus brief in NetChoice v. Paxton, the case I like to call TechLords v. Texas.

I have three things to say.

First, the DEI Statement section of the bill is good, but should be amended by inserting “or suggest to” so it reads

(b) An institution may not require OR SUGGEST TO an applicant, an employee, or a person described in subsection(a) that he pledge allegiance to or make a statement of personal support for any:

Otherwise, a university can say in its job ad that a DEI statement is optional--- but then quietly discard all applications lacking a DEI statement.

Second, the sections on tenure and post-tenure review need drastic overhaul. As written, they provide too many pretexts for university faculty and administrators to persecute professors they don’t like. IU spent enormous resources trying to find an excuse to fire me, though they didn’t come up with much of anything except things like asking a Chinese student about his home country and complimenting a woman professor’s dress. It isn’t just conservatives, either. I’ve spent a lot of tim on the phone with Dr. Mark McPhail of IU-Northwest, who also faced a vindictive Provost. Dr. Smith, you probably know Mark. The University will use the section against their enemies while ignoring its mandate as their friends do much worse things.

Third, the sections on tenure and post-tenure review ignore non-tenure-track faculty, [I was wrong about this— it *is* included, just not in the place I thought it would be.]

Figure 4: The Republican Representatives, with spectators (inlcuding me and Moira Marsh) in the third row and behind

1. The next day Senator Yoder and Representative Pierce said they’d watched a lot of the hearing on video and that it might well have set a record for an Education Committee hearing, going on for over 7 hours without a recess even for lunch. I was one of the last witnesses, so we were all exhausted. I really admire the Indiana Representives on the Education Committee; they stayed and they listened, though their questions became fewer as everyone’s energy level flagged.

2. I gave my 1-page handout and my 7-page Substack essay to an aide to distribute to the Representatives.

3. Rep. Vernon Smith (same name as the Nobel laureate), Democrat, Gary, is a professor at IU-Northwest. Mark McPhail was Executive Vice Chancellor and then stepped down to be a tenured Communications professor. Both are Black and leftwing.

4. Dr. McPhail first had his salary cut by over half and then was fired, despite his tenure. This was the result of petty internal politics. As Chair of the Indiana AAUP Conference’s Committee A, on academic freedom, I’d spent a long time on the phone with Dr. McPhail talking strategy. IU-NW was censured by the national AAUP as a result of his case.

5. Several earlier witnesses, including our State AAUP President Moira McPhail, had talked about how S.B. 202 would result in lawsuits that would be expensive for the State of Indiana. I wanted to point out that expensive lawsuits are already happening or being settled before they’re even filed (I’m looking at you, Indiana State University); it’s just they’re kept quiet.

6. Dr. McPhail sued Indiana University and the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount of money that the University made McPhail promise not to tell anyone. The case documents are pretty amazing. You wouldn’t believe how bad the Administation at IU-NW is, or to what an extreme the IU lawyers and Presidents’ Office in Bloomington back them up. This is how universities behave when they want to fire someone illegally: they fire him, wait for him to sue, settle the case for a large sum of money, and pay extra for him to agree not to tell anyone how bad they are.

7. Conscientiousness and Agreeability are terms of art, two of the “Big Five” personality traits that are standard in psychology (similar to the Myers-Briggs traits). The others are Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Openness. Are geniuses not Open? Maybe not.

8. A controversial part of an earlier Ed Committee bill that day had been whether summer reading tutors had to be licensed teachers, as well as “trained in the science of reading”. One person said that without requiring a license, the tutors might just be people without even a high school degree. I thought of Zakia, my math substitute, who is from Pakistan and maybe didn’t finish high school but was doing a perfectly good job of substituting 7th grade math for me using my notes. She did have the experience of home-schooling three highly energetic boys up through 6th grade, though.

9. Whether to flunk 3rd graders if their reading level was too low was another issue in the big reading bill discussed earlier in the day. There was muh talk about how traumatized they’d be. In my school, we often hold back students for math. They don’t seem much bothered. They do better the second time round, naturally. I remember how excited one of them was when he got an A on a math test, probably for the first time in his life. If the extra year does work, it really makes the student appreciate how much he’s learned.

10. Jim Bopp is well known in Indiana Republican circles. When I went to a fundraiser dinner for for Rep. Erin Houchin, who is my U.S. Representative but not his, I was surprised to see him there. He was ready to represent me if I sued my Chancellor and Dean, but I’d decided not to. He did jump in on short notice to represent me at the Supreme Court for my amicus there, which was great, since he was the lawyer in the famous Citizens United campaign finance case and a very sharp guy.

11. Rep. Delaney is a strongly partisan old-fashioned Democrat, a Harvard Law grade who represents northwest Indianapolis.

12. Many previous witnesses had said that if S.B. 202 passes, professors won’t want to take jobs at Indiana public universities, because they’ll be afraid of being disciplined for being too political in their classes. Thus, I wanted to point out that Indiana is already missing out on faculty because the universities are politicized— real, definite, loss of the best faculty for the job, rather than hypothetical.

13. I actually once came close to being a true intellectual diversity hire at UCLA’s law school. In 1992 the school was divided between radical and liberals, with one old and disgruntled conservative professor. The Dean and Chair were very interested in having me join, even though I was an economist, since I got along well with the law faculty. It didn’t work out in the end, though, and I came to Indiana instead.

14. “Erik Rassmussen” is about the fanciest spelling I’ve seen of “Eric Rasmusen”.