BY HANK REICHMAN

Human affairs are filled with contradiction.  “Cognitive dissonance,” the mental stress associated with holding two opposing views at the same time, is far from uncommon.  F. Scott Fitzgerald famously declared, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

That said, I don’t think it’s too much to demand that legislators try to pass laws that don’t obviously contradict each other.  Yet that’s what Republican legislators in Tennessee are trying to accomplish.  In 2019, Tennessee adopted the Campus Free Speech Protection Act, one of many similar pieces of legislation adopted by conservative legislatures based on a model bill devised by a right-wing think tank.  In a report by its Government Relations Committee, the AAUP concluded that such legislation’s “primary goal is not to enhance campus free speech but to protect conservative voices.”

The Tennessee “free speech” act included the following provisions:

• An institution shall be committed to maintaining a campus as a marketplace of ideas for all students and all faculty in which the free exchange of ideas is not to be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the institution’s community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed;
•  It is for an institution’s individual students and faculty to make judgments about ideas for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress free speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose;
•  It is not the proper role of an institution to attempt to shield individuals from free speech, including ideas and opinions they find offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed;

These are admirable words, but if anyone doubted the hypocrisy standing behind them — and the correctness of the AAUP’s reading — check out the latest proposal from basically the same legislators, just a few years later.

Now the Republican-controlled legislature is advancing legislation that would allow students and staffers to sue public colleges and universities if they feel they’ve been unfairly punished for not accepting “divisive concepts.”  According to U.S. News and World Report, the bill, which passed the state House on Monday, “is part of the long slate of bills Republicans have introduced this year targeting what concepts and issues should be addressed in Tennessee’s education system.  This latest bill would prohibit public colleges and universities from punishing students and staffers if they do not agree with certain ideas and open them up to lawsuits if they violate the measure.”  The bill is just one of many such proposals which, as the AAUP has put it, “legislate ignorance” and which PEN America has rightfully labeled “educational gag orders.”

The bill identifies more than 15 “divisive concepts,” ranging from declaring that “one race or sex is inherently superior or inferior to another race or sex” to “an individual, by virtue of the individual’s race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously” to “this state or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist.”  Teaching that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex” and that “a meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist or designed by a particular race or sex to oppress members of another race or sex” are also forbidden.

Under the Tennessee bill, a public college or university in the state must within ten days investigate any complaint against an employee, including faculty members, alleged to have violated the act.  A first violation will result in a written reprimand, but a second may result in dismissal.  In other words, as one Twitter user pointed out, “It will only take two student complaints to terminate a tenured faculty member at the University of Tennessee with passage of this bill.”

So much for that recent commitment to protecting the free exchange of ideas that may be “offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed.”  It’s not even as if this new law would repeal the previous one, which it so blatantly contradicts!  Isn’t it possible, should this latest bill go into law, that a university could be guilty of violating one of these acts merely by enforcing the other?

Nonetheless, in one of the most striking illustrations of “cognitive dissonance” I’ve ever seen, Republican Rep. Ron Gant of Rossville smugly declared, “This bill does not stifle any of that free exchange of ideas and debate and discussion in the classroom.”

Somehow, I don’t think this is what Fitzgerald was thinking of when he used the term “first-rate intelligence.”

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom has recently been published.