BY JOHN K. WILSON

Stanley Kurtz is at it again: He has another bad idea for unnecessary and counterproductive legislation. In the past, he’s sought to impose mandatory penalties on disruptive protesters and rules for institutional neutrality.

This time, it’s an attempt to force public colleges to have more debates and conservative speakers by enacting The Campus Intellectual Diversity Act.

Kurtz takes a wonderful idea that I have long advocated, for colleges to promote debates and discussions of opposing ideas, and he completely ruins this great idea by legislating it and suffocating it with insane bureaucratic rules.

Even a good idea should not be forced on colleges through legislation, because it encourages politicians to interfere in higher education in ways that are likely to stifle free expression. If it’s okay to legislate “intellectual diversity,” then politicians think it must be okay to legislate bans on things that offend politicians, too. Likewise, when a college is forced to do something, it will tend to follow the letter of the law while ignoring the spirit of open debate. Persuading colleges to hold debates and funding these activities is a far more effective and far less repressive option than this deeply misguided legislation.

Legislation forcing colleges to do something is generally bad, but this particular act is full of serious problems. The most serious flaws are the ones baffling to comprehend. Apparently, Kurtz really likes paper. And he thinks big piles of paper are the solution to promote intellectual diversity. Thus, a key provision of his Act is to force public colleges to print out campus events.

The model legislation requires “Maintaining a permanent, publicly accessible, searchable, and up-to-date calendar in print” and online listing all events “that address public policy issues.” How, exactly, you make a printed schedule “searchable” is beyond me, but the law says you have to do it. Many hours will be wasted figuring out what events address public policy issues and then regularly printing out the campus event schedules so that they can be made public for all of the people wandering around a college campus who cannot figure out how to use the internet. This is silly.

Oh, but Kurtz loves the paperwork. There’s piles and piles of it: “Delivering a printed and a pdf-formatted copy of the previous academic year’s annual public policy event calendar…. to the public, the Governor, and the State Legislature by September 1 of each year ” I’m sure these politicians will be thrilled to read thousands of pages of campus events with speakers they’ve never heard of that happened in the past year. Why is it useful to require someone to print out every event on campus and copy it into a pdf document? What is the point of all this compelled bureaucracy when every colleges already has an online calendar that’s easily accessible?

The requirement that every single event organized by this office must be recorded on video and posted online also adds enormously to the expense of events and decreases the likelihood it will be able to organize any small events (like a simple discussion among students) or will be able to coordinate events with others on campus. Do we really need a vast expansion of the number of badly-lit amateur videos with terrible sound that are posted online where nobody will watch them? It seems like the primary purpose for these recordings will be for right-wing trolls to carefully scrutinize them for any bad thoughts expressed by a leftist speaker that can be used to demand their dismissal.

National Association of Scholars head Peter Wood declared, “The Campus Intellectual Diversity Act is a major step towards overcoming these barriers to the expression of competing ideas on campus.” No, it’s not. The Act is pointless bureaucracy at best, and at worst could be likely to be destructive to intellectual diversity.

The bureaucratic burdens on the Campus Intellectual Diversity Act are so onerous that it is difficult to imagine any office like this organizing a substantial number of events.

Kurtz claims, “The new office will be more effective if it reports to one of the less-politicized divisions within the university administration,” so his model legislation requires the office to report to the institutional research office or the office of legal counsel. It is crazy for an event organizer to report to an office that knows nothing about campus events.

It’s difficult to imagine a worse choice that the legal counsel; on most campuses, no one is more devoted to obeying the whims of top administrators and avoiding anything controversial than the legal counsel. Has any legal counsel ever urged a college to invite speakers with divisive views that might spark outrage and protests? The legal counsel will not care if events are intelligent and insightful, but only whether they meet the legal demands of the legislature. It will not matter whether this office adds to the intellectual climate on campus, as long as everything is posted online and all the schedules are duly printed out and made publicly available for no one to read them.

Of course, Kurtz’s real goal with this law is affirmative action for conservative speakers. The Act requires “particular attention to inviting participants from outside the institution who hold perspectives on widely debated public policy issues otherwise poorly represented on campus.” This is misguided in a couple of ways. Why should the participants only be from outside the institution? We should want more conservatives on campus to express themselves. But more importantly, Kurtz is wrong if he thinks conservatives are the only poorly represented group on college campuses. Plenty of groups can point out that they are only a small minority of the public policy speakers on campus: African-Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, GLBTQ individuals, people from working class backgrounds, union members, communists, and many more. I suspect that Kurtz never imagined that his act could be used to increase real intellectual diversity with more diverse left-wing speakers, but that’s literally what it says.

The act requires colleges to “Invite and host speakers who can ably articulate widely-held perspectives on public policy issues otherwise poorly represented on campus.” How many millions of people does it take before a view is “widely held”? Are colleges obligated to have creationists debating evolution? What about astrologers debating astronomers? Surely anti-vax advocates qualify as “widely held” views and must share the stage with medical experts. And certainly there are enough 9-11 truthers (although they are poorly represented on campus) to ensure that any discussion of terrorism include those who know it was a US government conspiracy. In fact, a law like this will be an invitation for every crackpot to file a lawsuit demanding a speech on campus.

Of course, Kurtz hopes that this model legislation, no matter what it actually says, will be used as a tool to give special preferences and funding to conservative speakers—you know, the people who are already given big piles of money by conservative foundations to speak on campuses or serve as Senior Fellows rather than having to work for a living like academics do.

In other words, this could be called the Make Colleges Pay Stanley Kurtz To Complain About Them Act, since the primary beneficiaries are intended to be conservative pundits like Kurtz. But even if you believed that conservatives (and no one else) need special treatment to be heard on college campuses due to their oppression, this proposal is a terrible, anti-conservative, big government approach to that goal. It can easily be interpreted in other ways, it creates an awful and micromanaged bureaucracy that wastes money, and it does so using government intrusion in academia.

What are the alternatives? Well, there is the free market. Kurtz could encourage wealthy conservatives to put money into bringing conservative speakers to campus. Or well-paid conservatives like Kurtz could volunteer to speak on campus (as some leftists do) in order to bring more diversity. Or Kurtz could encourage legislators to provide extra funding for campus debates without these ridiculous requirements (his proposal suggests forcing colleges to reallocate campus funds to this project instead, which is pretty much a guarantee that it will be badly underfunded).

This model legislation is a terrible idea. It claims to solve a real problem where we need more serious debate in America, but it actually makes the problem worse by announcing, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”