...Arizona, where a Senate committee on Thursday approved a bill that would ... ban professors at public colleges and universities, while working, from:
Endorsing, supporting or opposing any candidate for local, state or national office.
Endorsing, supporting or opposing any pending legislation, regulation or rule under consideration by local, state or federal agencies.
Endorsing, supporting or opposing any litigation in any court.
Advocating “one side of a social, political, or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.”
Hindering military recruiting on campus or endorsing the activities of those who do.
My experience with higher education--vast though it is, now being the first time in over a decade I don't spend every day of my life on a university campus--is admittedly skewed. I've never had the experience of a prof's lecture devolving into an overtly political screed. The handful of "humanities" and "social science" classes I took as an undergrad were populated mostly by aspiring engineers and scientists who were probably studying pchem or emag during the lectures anyway. So it's difficult for me to see this as much more than a solution in search of a problem. But maybe that isn't everyone's experience.
If you have a prof who is spending his or her lecture time campaigning for Ralph Nader (or whatever), this is something a dean or department head ought to handle. Not because it constitutes a violation of the students' "rights", but because the prof isn't doing their job, and the students aren't getting what they (or their parents, or Sallie Mae, or the state lottery) are paying for. A state law prohibiting the utterance of anything potentially controversial is probably overkill.
What actually bothers me is not simply that this bill would regulate what profs can say in the classroom (though that is certainly reason enough for it to be a problem), but that the boundaries of what constitutes "while working" are not clearly delineated.
Most professors (especially in the sciences) actually spend a relatively small fraction of their working time in the classroom. As someone who aspires to have the title myself in the not-too-distant future, I can attest that most professors in the sciences would characterize the fraction of their time spent teaching to be "as little as possible".
The remainder of their time "on the clock" is spent dealing with the administrative business of teaching (preparing lectures, grading, office hours), and a lot more time engaged in their own scholarly work: writing, reading, mentoring graduate students and postdocs, running a lab (which is many cases is like running a small company), writing grants, reviewing papers, going to seminars, sitting on committees for the university, attending conferences, serving on editorial boards for journals, sitting on study sections, and maybe--just maybe--setting foot in the lab and conducting an experiment or two.
Just as an example, I think my graduate mentor spends about 8 hours lecturing. Every year.
So...during all that time, they are not to express a political opinion to anyone?
This is probably a moot point...even if the bill passes, it is almost certain to be challenged in court and likely overturned (I would hope) on any number of constitutional grounds. Still, I occasionally entertain the fantasy of landing a faculty job in Tucson (summers aside, I really do miss the place) but I have to admit this makes that seem a lot less appealing.
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