As legislative sessions kick off across the country, the wave of higher education reform continues. In addition to the numerous federal actions impacting higher education, state legislatures—predominantly red—are voting on bills that could have far reaching impacts.

HxA's policy team is monitoring this influx of bills impacting open inquiry and academic freedom, while engaging with lawmakers to share our analyses, recommendations, and fight for open inquiry at our institutions of higher learning. In this legislative roundup, we provide an overview of state-level bills, including ones that aim to eliminate tenure, axe DEI, establish new schools on campuses, and address antisemitism.

Tenure Abolition: Texas HB 1830 & Kansas HB 2348

Summary of Texas HB 1830: Texas HB 1830 would end tenure at all Texas public institutions of higher education, with a grandfather clause for currently tenured faculty. The bill allows, but does not mandate, the Board of Regents to establish “an alternate system of tiered employment status for faculty members provided that the system clearly defines each position and requires each faculty member to undergo an annual performance evaluation.”

Summary of Kansas HB 2348: Kansas HB 2348 would end tenure in all of Kansas' public universities and colleges by statutorily declaring that tenure is not a property right that requires due process before severing. Unlike Texas HB1830, this bill does not have a grandfather clause for faculty currently tenured, so it would remove protections of tenure from those who currently have it.

Analysis: Tenure has traditionally been considered one of the core mechanisms that protects academic freedom.

The Texas bill is straightforward because it simply forbids offering tenure after September 1, 2025. The Texas legislation makes no mention of whether the annual performance evaluations would carry the potential for termination, presumably allowing institutions to put termination on the table at all times. Moreover, statements made by powerful public officials surrounding tenure in Texas suggest that the primary motivation behind this bill is not to find a better way to protect academic freedom but rather to remove those freedoms so that it would be easier to remove faculty whose politics they oppose.

The Kansas bill negates tenure differently. By declaring tenure does not confer a property right, institutions could revoke an individual’s tenure without the possibility of violating their constitutional due process rights that attach when the government takes something of value. If this bill were enacted, an institution could strip an individual of tenure and that person would no longer have a constitutional due process claim. Because the core of tenure is the substantive and procedural protections that give life to academic freedom, stripping those due process rights would render tenure meaningless.

HxA opposes Texas HB 1830 and Kansas HB 2348 because they end tenure without providing a clear alternative that adequately protects academic freedom. Without a clear alternative mechanism for academic freedom protections, these bills risk undermining academic freedom by encouraging self-censorship throughout Texas and Kansas public universities.

Heterodox Academy objected to HB 2348 to the Kansas House Judiciary Committee through written testimony. In our testimony we argued:

HB 2348 would end tenure at Kansas’s public institutions of higher education both prospectively and retroactively. Ending tenure—especially in legislation that offers no alternative protections for academic freedom—would compromise the health of Kansas’s public colleges and universities because it would leave faculty without key protections that allow for open inquiry to thrive.

HxA Recommendation: Legislatures should reject bills that undermine or eliminate tenure without offering feasible alternatives for protecting academic freedom.

DEI Reforms: Iowa HSB 53 and Wyoming SF 103

Summary of Iowa HSB 53 and Wyoming SF 103: There are several state bills pending across the country that contain nearly identical language aiming to remove Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) mandates from public colleges and universities, while allowing a mechanism for exemptions for classroom instruction. Iowa’s HSB 53 and Wyoming’s SF 103 are two examples.

The bills:

• prohibit expenditures of any funds on DEI offices;
• prohibit giving anyone preferential treatment, in any context, on account of a DEI statement;
• prohibit giving “preference on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin to an applicant for employment, an employee or a participant in any core function of the entity;” and
• prohibit requiring students or employees to attend DEI trainings.

None of those provisions break new ground, and the bills expressly exempt classroom instruction. But there is another aspect of the legislation that stands out. Both bills take a novel approach to regulating courses “whose course description, course overview, course objectives, proposed student learning outcomes, written examinations or written or oral assignments for which the student will receive a grade includes content on diversity, equity and inclusion or critical race theory.”

With respect to courses that meet that description, the governing boards are instructed to adjust their curricula and designate courses “in a manner that does not require or constrain students to expend tuition or other funds on, or enroll in, a related course in order to satisfy the requirements of any academic degree program, including general education, major, minor or certificate requirements” (emphasis added). The legislation then grants the governing boards the authority to exempt from that requirement “[a]cademic degree program requirements of any major, minor, certificate or department whose title clearly establishes its course of study as primarily focused on racial, ethnic or gender studies.”

Analysis: HxA is neutral on whether institutions should maintain DEI offices. We have argued that eliminating illiberal forms of DEI—like mandatory DEI statements used during hiring and promotion processes as political litmus tests—helps advance open inquiry. However, overzealous crackdowns on DEI can take the form of censorship that threatens academic freedom, as is the case when research and classroom discussion with DEI components are banned across the board.

The Supreme Court has long held that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” Unlike laws such as Florida’s Stop WOKE Act, which banned certain ideas related to DEI from being taught in college classrooms, and Florida’s follow up law, which banned those ideas from required general education courses, this bill states that each institution must offer courses where students can meet graduation requirements without confronting those ideas. In other words, some of the courses that meet graduation requirements may contain those ideas, so long as there are also alternatives.

The legislation also empowers Governing Boards to exempt certain majors from this provision. While the bills include a mechanism for providing exemptions for course content and degree programs, neither bill requires such exemptions, potentially leading to entire disciplines being effectively banned. In the worst case scenario, these bills could eviscerate academic freedom.

Similarly, regulating general education or graduation requirements evoke important issues of shared governance. Should state legislators dictate general education curricula or graduation requirements? Likewise, does it best serve students to allow them to avoid controversial course content altogether? These are fundamental questions that speak to the heart of how higher educational institutions may and may not be regulated by their government funders.

Campus Antisemitism: Nebraska LB 538 and Maryland SB 435

Summary of Nebraska LB 538: LB 538 mandates the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism during disciplinary proceedings at Nebraska’s public colleges and universities.

Summary of Maryland SB 435: SB 435 requires public elementary, secondary, and postsecondary educational institutions to employ Title VI coordinators to address conduct that might violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in educational programs and other programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. Title VI is the statute that, among other things, grants the federal government the authority to require educational institutions to combat antisemitic harassment when that harassment is on the basis of stereotypes about characteristics related to the real or perceived shared ethnicity or national origin.

Analysis: HxA opposes Nebraska LB 538 on constitutional grounds. The First Amendment does not recognize exceptions for antisemitic speech, just as it does not for other forms of hate speech (as ruled in Texas v. Johnson and Matal v. Tam). A federal court in Texas has already found that a state directive requiring the IHRA definition in campus disciplinary proceedings likely violates the First Amendment (Students for Justice in Palestine v. Abbott).

The IHRA definition is overly broad and vague, so using it to control speech creates a chilling effect on free expression. The definition declares that “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is a contemporary example of antisemitism, despite the fact that such a claim constitutes core political speech protected under the First Amendment. Unlike terms such as “racism” and “sexism,” which are not legally defined in statutory law, defining “antisemitism” in this manner would set a dangerous precedent.

With respect to Maryland SB 435, HxA has no objection to requiring institutions to employ coordinators dedicated to ensuring compliance with Title VI, noting that is the case with all bureaucracies, it will be necessary to scrutinize their actions to ensure that they are consistent with legal obligations.

Heterodox Academy raised our objections to LB 538 to the Nebraska Senate Committee on Education through written testimony. There we explained that:

The real question isn’t whether the particular expression is antisemitic but whether it crosses the line into one of the unprotected categories of speech, such as true threats, harassment, or incitement of violence. NE LB 538 makes no attempt to define harassment, incitement, or violence in a way consistent with First Amendment jurisprudence.

HxA Recommendation: Institutions must protect Jews from antisemitic harassment, but they must do so constitutionally. HxA does not object to Maryland SB 435’s proposal to require institutions to have Title VI coordinators. With respect to Nebraska LB 538, instead of mandating the IHRA definition, Nebraska should require universities to adopt the Supreme Court’s standard for harassment (Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education), defining harassment as conduct that is “severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive.”

This approach would focus institutions on evaluating whether conduct is actionable rather than whether it is bigoted. Furthermore, institutions should implement and fairly enforce content- and viewpoint-neutral regulations on speech, following Ward v. Rock Against Racism.

HxA is eager to work with Nebraska lawmakers to improve LB 538 in a way that balances the obligation to combat campus antisemitism with free speech protections.

Establishing a School of Intellectual Freedom: Iowa HSB 52

Summary of Iowa HSB 52: Iowa HSB 52 proposes the creation of a School of Intellectual Freedom, dedicated to teaching and researching historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order. The school would also offer university-wide programming.

Analysis: HxA supports the additive approach of Iowa HSB 52, as it expands academic offerings without banning ideas or policing classroom speech. However, one worrying aspect of the bill is that the dean of the school would have exclusive hiring and firing privileges, effectively stripping faculty within the center of due process rights. The lack of due process is a concern that needs to be addressed.

HxA Recommendation: If Iowa wishes to create a school of intellectual freedom, it should avoid concentrating the hiring and firing processes in the hands of any single administrator. The legislation should be amended to guarantee that faculty are afforded meaningful due process protections.

We’ll stay on this.

The recent wave of legislation affecting higher education demonstrates that a growing subset of lawmakers are unhappy with how colleges and universities have governed themselves. Many of their current proposals have profound implications for academic freedom and institutional governance.

HxA will continue to monitor the legislative landscape. We will oppose bills that threaten academic freedom, and support those that align with our values. We are committed to advocating balanced, principled policy reforms that protect academic freedom while ensuring universities remain spaces for rigorous debate and open inquiry. Where edits to these bills would be sufficient, we encourage continued discussion and revision of these legislative efforts to ensure they uphold the highest standards of intellectual diversity and institutional integrity.