Iowa’s public universities would need to consider political party affiliation when hiring new faculty members, under a bill proposed by a Republican state senator.

State senator Mark Chelgren said the measure was an attempt to counter the liberal slant at the state’s three public universities.

“My goal isn’t to eliminate speech on the other side of the equation, but we have to have balanced speech,” said Chelgren, from Ottumwa.

Under SF 288, the universities would use voter registration information when considering job applicants, and could not make any hire that would cause declared Democrats or Republicans on the faculty to outnumber the other party by more than 10%.

Veronica Fowler, communications director for the ACLU of Iowa, called the bill “extreme”.



“It is obviously unconstitutional,” she said. “You can’t hire or fire people at a public university based on their political affiliation.”

State senator Herman Quirmbach, the ranking Democrat on the education committee, said the proposal amounted to a political litmus test.

“I’m very much opposed to this. I think it’s an ominous threat to academic freedom, not to mention the personal privacy of faculty members,” said Quirmbach, who is also an associate professor of economics at Iowa State.

Iowa backed Donald Trump in November by nine percentage points in the presidential election, and Republicans took control of the governorship and both houses of the state legislature for the first time since 1998.



Republicans have moved fast since consolidating power in Des Moines, passing legislation last week to scale back collective bargaining rights for the state’s public workers.

Iowa’s move to the right runs counter to the prevailing political views on university faculties, Chelgren said.

Chelgren said that faculty members who supported Trump have told him they have found the atmosphere on campus intimidating. Faculty who voted for Trump said they risked not getting tenure if they made their political views known, according to Chelgren.

In an email to the Guardian, Thomas E Vaughn, president of the faculty senate at the University of Iowa, said: “I am not aware of, either directly or anecdotally, any instances of political intimidation or payback directed at University of Iowa faculty as a result of the election.”

The Iowa board of regents, which oversees the three public universities, also opposed the bill.

“We expect our universities to hire the most qualified faculty to teach our students, and we believe in diversity of thought,” Josh Lehman, the senior communications director for the regents, said in a statement.

Declaring your party affiliation in Iowa is as simple as filling out a voter registration form, and Chelgren conceded that job applicants could simply switch their registration from Democrat to Republican, or register as independent.

In fact, Chelgren said, he would encourage professors to register as independents to remind them that they are supposed to give students a balance of viewpoints.

Quirmbach agreed that professors need to give students a diversity of viewpoints, but added politics is simply not part of the discussion in most academic disciplines.

The economics professor said Chelgren’s proposal had already damaged the reputation of the state’s public universities in academic circles, making recruiting top faculty more difficult.

In North Carolina, a state senator made a proposal similar to Chelgren’s during debate on the makeup of the University of North Carolina’s board of governors this week. The amendment, offered by state senator Ralph Hise, a Republican, would cover hiring at state universities, and stated: “Those faculty designated as tenure-track hired and granted tenure at each constituent institution shall reflect the ideological balance of the citizens of the State.”

The amendment would bar a university from “a faculty ideological balance of greater or less than two percent of the ideological balance of the state”.

The measure was tabled.

Hise said he introduced the amendment simply to make a point about the fallacies of setting aside spots on the board of governors for different demographic groups, the Associated Press reported.

In Iowa, Chelgren’s bill was read for the first time this week in the state senate, and then referred to the education committee. If passed, it would affect the University of Iowa, Iowa State and the University of Northern Iowa.