LINCOLN — Bills to eliminate tenure protection for university professors in an effort to halt “indoctrination (of) leftist ideology,” and one to do away with Nebraska’s inheritance tax were among 37 proposals introduced during a snowy Monday at the State Capitol.

State Sen. Loren Lippincott of Central City, who introduced the tenure bill, said in an email that “higher education lacks a serious degree of accountability” because of tenure, which grants protection to professors after proving their competence, from being fired for disagreements with administrators or for controversial scholarly opinions.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman for the University of Nebraska system hinted that eliminating tenure could threaten recruitment and retention of faculty.

Lippincott said the tenure system protects “poorly performing professors” and those who “allow their students no wiggle room for disagreements with their espoused dogma.”

‘Woke ideology’

The senator wrote that “woke ideology” is being pushed at the University of Nebraska campuses.

” … As tax-paying citizens, we have a right to expect that our tax dollars will be used to educate and edify our students, not indoctrinate them with leftist ideology,” Lippincott said in an email.

His Legislative Bill 1064 has 11 co-sponsors.

The bill calls for tenure to replaced by “employee agreements” at state universities and colleges that require annual performance reviews, “minimum standards of good practice” and “procedures for dismissal for cause, program discontinuance, and financial exigency.”

Melissa Lee, a spokeswoman for the NU system, said officials there are reviewing Lippincott’s proposal.

“Our plans for the University of Nebraska to grow and compete will require us to hold all our faculty and staff to high levels of performance and accountability,” Lee said.

One University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor tweeted that there were so many problems with Lippincott’s proposal “that I hardly know where to begin.”

“Lippincott told a reporter that he wants to destroy tenure because he wants to punish professors for expressing opinions he doesn’t hold. Which is precisely why tenure and academic freedom exist,” wrote Ari Kohen, a UNL political science professor.

Bills to end or restrict tenure were introduced last year in Texas, North Dakota, Florida and Iowa. The legislature.

‘Double tax’

Elmwood Sen. Rob Clements would eliminate the state’s inheritance tax by 2028 via his LB 1067, which has 24 co-sponsors.

Nebraska is one of only five states that levy such a “death tax,” and eliminating it has become a prime target for tax cutters over the years and again in 2024.

Clements said the inheritance tax amounts to a “double tax,” since property taxes are already paid on land and residence. It encourages retirees to move out of Nebraska, he said, so their descendants don’t have to pay the tax.

Right now, immediate relatives, such as a parent, sibling or child, pay a 1% inheritance tax on property they receive in excess of $100,000. But the tax rate climbs to up to 15% for the most remote relatives, and less is exempt.

Nebraska counties have consistently defended the inheritance tax as a way to finance one-time capital improvement projects — such as bridges — and argue that if it goes away, a much more objectionable tax — property tax — will rise.

Another aspect of Clements’ proposal would have the state reimburse counties $35 a day for any state prisoners held at a county jail, unless the state is short of funds.

LB 1067 would allocate $3.9 million a year for the State Prisoner Reimbursement Act.

Incentives for teachers

Fremont Sen. Lynne Walz introduced two bills Monday to help address the state’s teacher shortage.

LB 1052 would allow teachers at public and private schools to obtain up to $300 per year in reimbursement for purchases of classroom supplies.

Walz, a former teacher, said it would be welcome help, especially for new teachers, who have to buy many of their own classroom supplies.

Another proposal, LB 1053, would give veteran teachers a bonus if they stay on a few more years.

The bill would provide up to five “extended-career retention grants” of $2,500 a year for such teachers who decline to retire.

Walz said part of Nebraska’s teacher shortage is because of the exodus of experienced teachers from the profession.

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Daniel Brinks, who chairs the government department at the University of Texas at Austin, doesn’t usually have a tough time recruiting professors. After all, UT is one of the best research universities in the country, located in a high-tech boomtown with a thriving music scene, a warm climate and first-rate enchiladas.

But this year, in “a pretty significant change,” Brinks said, eight candidates turned down job offers. Several of them cited events transpiring a few blocks south of campus, at the Texas Capitol, where some Republican lawmakers were pushing to eliminate tenure at state colleges and universities.

Anti-tenure Republicans in Texas — and in other states including , , , ,  and  — have said they want to rein in unaccountable professors who are pushing a liberal agenda in the classroom.

Supporters of tenure, which professors typically must earn after years of teaching and publishing original research, argue that it protects academic freedom. Without it, they say, professors might be wary of taking on controversial topics for fear of being fired.

“American higher education is the envy of the world because of the current system,” Irene Mulvey, president of the American Association of University Professors, told Stateline. “These bills that weaken tenure or limit tenure are bills that will undermine the quality of education in the state.”

But defenders of tenure — a practice adopted in its current form in 1940 — have deployed another argument that goes beyond academic freedom: Attacks on tenure are a threat to state economies. That argument, used by Brinks in Texas and others elsewhere, has figured prominently in debates over tenure in several states.

“If you no longer can attract the top researchers, you no longer have people developing cutting-edge technologies, cutting-edge medical innovations,” Brinks told Stateline, echoing testimony he delivered to Texas legislators.

The top teachers and researchers receive federal grants, Brinks noted, “and if you don’t have the top researchers in the various fields here, then that source of funds, which is millions and millions of dollars, it just goes away.”

Despite such concerns, the Texas Senate in April approved legislation that would have prohibited public colleges and universities from granting tenure to faculty members, starting in 2024.

“Tenured university professors are the only people in our society that have the guarantee of a job,” Texas Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, . “These professors claim ‘academic freedom’ and hide behind their tenure to continue blatantly advancing their agenda of societal division.”

But the Texas House last month approved a much milder version, allowing schools to fire tenured faculty for “professional incompetence” or “conduct involving moral turpitude.” is the one the legislature sent to the desk of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who is expected to .

State Rep. John Kuempel, the Republican who authored the House version, it would “provide accountability while maintaining an environment that is conducive to recruiting and retaining the best faculty and researchers in the state and nation.”

The economic argument also has surfaced in Ohio, where the state Senate a sweeping that aims to promote “intellectual diversity” on campuses. The measure would mandate a yearly performance review for faculty, including those with tenure.

Shortly before the vote, state Sen. Jerry Cirino, the Republican sponsor of the bill, argued that the legislation would attract more students and faculty to Ohio. The bill is still .

“When all is said and done here, our universities are going to be better,” Cirino said. “We are going to attract more people who have been turned away because of the liberal bias that is incontrovertible in our institutions in Ohio.”

But Democratic state Rep. Joe Miller argued the opposite, citing released last month which found that Ohio’s 14 public universities had a $68.9 billion impact on the state’s economy in fiscal year 2021-2022 — 8.8% of Ohio’s total gross state product. The study also found that the universities and their students supported nearly 867,000 jobs, 1 in 8 in Ohio.

The legislation would “make it extremely difficult to attract students and faculty to Ohio, which will be extraordinarily damaging to our economy, financially impacting cities from Akron, to Athens, Kent and Columbus,” Miller .

Economic concerns over curbing tenure also have been raised in and .

“We’re one of the few states, particularly of our size, to have two tier-one research institutions, so doing things to damage their reputation has broad implications,” Dustin Miller, executive director of the Iowa Chamber Alliance,  in explaining his group’s opposition to anti-tenure bills in his state.

There is little doubt that research universities are economic engines.

In a recent review of relevant research, the Brookings Institution think tank showing that higher state spending on universities to more patents and entrepreneurship; that each new patent outside the university in the local economy; and that regions that to a land grant university over a century ago have stronger economies than regions without one.

Joshua Drucker, a University of Illinois Chicago associate professor who about the economic impact of research institutions, said the millions of dollars that top researchers bring into their universities are “pure addition to a region,” and that curbing tenure could diminish that flow.

“What I expect to happen if tenure is severely weakened, but only in some places, [is that] those places would then have to spend a lot more to get top talent or they will lose the top talent,” he said.

Brinks, a top expert in his field who has secured funding from the National Science Foundation and worked with researchers around the world, said he always thought the University of Texas “was the perfect place for me.”

“I really like the mission of a public university in a place like Texas. I think we do something that’s really important to the state,” he said. “But to the extent that this atmosphere of questioning and even hostility to our mission and what we do continues, then it does occasionally raise questions about going to a private university or going out of state.

“It’s dispiriting to find that you’re the object of suspicion when you think what you’re doing is really important and valuable.”

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A bill filed Friday in the Texas Senate would prohibit public colleges and universities from awarding tenure to professors hired after September, legislation that critics have said would make it extremely difficult for the state to recruit top faculty and negatively impact the reputation of its higher education institutions.

The bill, filed by Sen. , R-Conroe, is one of three pieces of legislation in Lt. Gov. ’s list of priorities for higher education this session.

Creighton also filed a bill that would prohibit Texas’ higher education institutions from considering diversity, equity and inclusion when hiring new employees. The third bill, filed by Sen. , R-Mineola, would prohibit faculty members from teaching that any race, ethnicity, sex or political belief is “inherently superior to another.”

If they pass as filed, the bills would markedly change how the state’s universities operate.

Critics contend this legislation will create a chilling effect in college classrooms as teachers and students try to determine what is acceptable to discuss, putting restraints on core tenets of higher education, such as academic freedom and free inquiry.

“Tenure and academic freedom were designed to protect scholars who sometimes study unpopular things, from the very kinds of political influence that Texas and Florida and other states are trying to exert over the classroom,” said Victor Ray, a professor at The University of Iowa who has written a book on critical race theory. “[This] harms the U.S.’s ability to create new ideas and innovate and do the kinds of things that conservatives claim they’re interested in doing. If there’s entire branches of ideas that are off the table, you can’t debate them and figure out what’s right and move forward.”

Last year, Patrick announced a proposal to eliminate tenure for future hires as a way to combat faculty members who he said “indoctrinate” students with teachings about “critical race theory.”

Critical race theory is an academic discipline that studies the way race and racism have impacted America’s legal and social systems. Over the past few years, conservatives have used “critical race theory” as a broad label to attack progressive teachings and books in college and K-12 schools that discuss how race and racism are taught in schools.

When Patrick released his list of legislative priorities earlier this session, he called Hughes’ bill a ban on “critical race theory” in higher education. Patrick’s announcement to ban tenure was also in response to in February 2022 affirming instructors’ right to teach about racial justice and critical race theory in the classroom.

Since then, multiple university system leaders have expressed concerns that eliminating tenure might harm their ability to recruit top faculty. Last year, House Speaker said he disagreed with Patrick’s proposal to end tenure. Abbott has been largely silent on the issue.

As filed, Creighton’s bill would let employees who have or were awarded tenure before Sept. 1 hold on to the benefit. And it allows the board of regents of a university system to establish their own “tiered employment status for faculty members.”

Tenure is an indefinite appointment for university faculty that can only be terminated under extraordinary circumstances. Professors who are considered on track to earn tenure typically work for five or six years as a professor before they go through a monthslong tenure review process. Typically, all tenured and non-tenured faculty already receive annual performance reviews, while tenured professors undergo a periodic review process. At UT-Austin, for instance, tenured professors undergo a comprehensive review of their teaching, research and other contributions to the university every six years.

In a press release Friday, Creighton criticized tenure as “a costly perk that is detrimental to innovative research and quality instruction.”

“At a time when colleges and universities have unprecedented endowments, bloated administrative costs and ballooning tuition it is time for lawmakers to reevaluate an outdated practice that guarantees lifetime employment at taxpayer expense,” he said.

Creighton also filed a bill that would prohibit the use of diversity statements in hiring; ban offices that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; and expand the powers of boards of regents in hiring top administrators at their universities.

Under the bill, board members, who are appointed by the governor, would be able to approve or deny the hiring of vice presidents, provosts and deans, as well as approve courses in the core curriculum.

The bill says that universities cannot require students or faculty members to “endorse an ideology that promotes the differential treatment of an individual or group of individuals based on race, color, or ethnicity.”

Last month, Gov. ’s office sent a letter to public universities and state agencies saying that considering diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring practices violated federal and state employment laws and barring them from hiring on factors “other than merit.” Legal experts have said the governor’s office mischaracterized the legal practices employers use when considering diversity in their hiring.

In response to the governor’s order, multiple university systems prohibited diversity statements in future job applications. These statements are short essays where a potential employee could describe their experiences working with diverse student groups or share their experiences working with diverse populations and their commitment to helping a diverse group of students succeed. Conservative critics have characterized them as political litmus tests.

Creighton’s bill prohibits these statements statewide. It also says a university may not create or have a diversity, equity and inclusion office that considers anything but “color-blind and sex-neutral hiring processes,” conducts trainings or activities related to “race, color, ethnicity, gender identity or sexual orientation,” unless those trainings are approved in writing by the university’s general counsel and the Texas Attorney General.

The bill says the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board will maintain a list of people who are found to violate this section of the law, and that universities cannot hire people on that list. If the coordinating board finds that a university violates this section, it can charge the school up to $1 million or 1% of the amount of the institution’s operating expenses for the prior fiscal year.

“The elevation of DEI offices on campuses have only furthered divides and created a chilling effect on open dialogue,” Creighton said in the press release. “This legislation will ensure Texas college campuses are environments that are open to differing ideas, foster meaningful, reasoned dialogue, and encourage intellectual discourse.”

Also on Friday, Sen. Joan Huffman, R- Houston, filed another bill creating a new endowment stream for Texas Tech University, the University of Houston, Texas State University and the University of North Texas.

The bill would rename the existing National Research University Fund, which provides extra funding to universities trying to boost their research arms, to the Texas University Fund.

Texas voters must approve a constitutional amendment allowing the change and to add $2.5 billion to the endowment before the state can officially start the fund.

Disclosure: The University of Texas at Austin has been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Patrick’s Feb. 18 attack on tenured college professors came days after the University of Texas at Austin Faculty Council defending professors’ academic freedom, particularly as it relates to teaching critical race theory and race and gender justice.

If successful, Patrick’s proposal would affect faculty at El Paso Community College, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and the University of Texas at El Paso.

“Attacking tenure is a political ploy,” said Gina Núñez-Mchiri, president of the Faculty Senate at UTEP. “It’s a way of attacking people who are critical, not just of race, but also critical of anything that needs to be analyzed and examined to improve.”

Tenured professors have been granted lifetime employment with a college or university and are protected from being fired without cause.

Patrick issued a statement saying, “Tenured professors must not be able to hide behind the phrase ‘academic freedom,’ and then proceed to poison the minds of our next generation.

“Universities are being taken over by tenured, leftist professors, and it is high time that more oversight is provided.”

Patrick said he will additionally work to change tenure reviews from every six years to annually and will make teaching critical race theory cause for revoking tenure.

Critical race theory is a university level academic framework for examining systemic racism in U.S. laws, policies and society. Last year, the Legislature focused its efforts on banning critical race theory from K-12 public schools by restricting how teachers can discuss race and racism.

Núñez-Mchiri called Patrick’s remarks “an intimidation factor” and an attack on “intellectualism (and) academic freedom.” Tenure rewards and compensates professors for their advancements in academia, she said.

“Why would we disincentivize hardworking people from earning job security? It doesn’t make sense,” she said, adding that if Patrick’s proposals become law, this would impact universities’ ability to recruit professors to the state.

In a statement, Keri Moe, EPCC associate vice president for external relations, said the college “values tenure and we would seek input from our faculty leadership should such legislation be put forth.”

Jeffrey Shepherd, a history professor at UTEP, said while threats to ending tenure aren’t new, higher education institutions should be alarmed by Patrick’s announcement.

“This is part of a long term right wing assault on public universities that goes back to the 1960s at least,” Shepherd said. “Conservatives say that radical liberal Marxist professors are brainwashing our poor students. It’s factually incorrect. Public universities are supposed to be places of higher learning.”

Threatening tenure threatens “the foundations of the university itself,” Shepherd said. “The board of regents, the chancellors are going to have a problem with that.”

Patrick, who presides over the Texas Senate, is running for reelection this year.

He said that state Sen. Brandon Creighton, R-Conroe, who chairs the Texas Senate Higher Education Committee, supports his tenure proposals.

State Sen. César Blanco, D-El Paso, is on the Higher Education Committee. “Teaching history, the good as well as the bad, whether you call it CRT or something else, shouldn’t be grounds for having tenure revoked,” he said.

College students should be able to make their own judgments about the material they are taught, Blanco said.

“These are young adults, they can think for themselves, they can form their own opinions,” he said. “We need to make sure that we’re focusing on making sure that we’re making students critical thinkers.”

Molly Smith contributed to this story.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

In a series of four November 2020 emails to Board of Trustees member Kelly Hopkins, two of which spanned a dozen paragraphs or more, Hussman argued that Hannah-Jones’s telling of the American story over-emphasized the role of slavery and warned that her stance on reparations would be “detrimental” to the university, describing Hannah-Jones’s views as “controversial, contentious, and divisive.”

“I do not dispute [Hannah-Jones] having her convictions in favor of reparations, nor do I dispute her right to advocate for it as strongly as possible,” Hussman wrote. “But I believe giving her a platform to argue for this as a tenured professor in the journalism school will not be beneficial, but instead detrimental, to the school.”

“No one knows exactly what she will say in the future,” he continued. “She could be fired from the New York Times. But as I understand it, she could not be fired as a tenured professor.”

Hussman, whose name adorns the UNC school of journalism thanks to a $25 million pledge in 2019, the balance of which has yet to be delivered, first shared his concerns with David Routh, UNC-Chapel Hill’s senior development officer in September. Emails indicate that board members Chuck Duckett, Jeff Brown and Richard Stevens were also made aware of the donor’s appeal, in addition to Kelly Hopkins. All four trustees have since left the board after .

Hannah-Jones would have been the first Black Knight Chair since the position was founded at UNC.

����Ӱ�� received the internal emails July 30 after filing a Freedom of Information Act request with the university, as did several other media organizations, which have also reported on the communications.

In another message that included annotations of passages from an 1856 Abraham Lincoln speech, Hussman argued that Hannah-Jones’s , a collection of essays from the New York Times Magazine that relates the country’s founding and development through the experiences of Black Americans and earned the journalist a Pulitzer Prize, overstated the role that slavery played in the American Revolution.

“The country may have committed its original sin,” Hussman wrote, “but it was not what the founders or the colonies were intending at that time, in 1776.”

“I thought to myself, who are you going to believe: Abraham Lincoln or Nikole Hannah Jones?”

In 2020, the New York Times to an essay from The 1619 Project, changing a line to clarify that protecting the institution of slavery was a primary motivation for some, not all, colonists during the American Revolution.

In June, Hussman told NC Policy Watch that he , and that the balance of his donation was not dependent on their decision. He did not respond to requests from ����Ӱ�� asking him to explain his intentions in sending the November emails.

Text messages also indicate that Hussman and Hopkins frequently spoke on the phone through the fall and winter of 2020, and the spring of 2021.

After Hussman sent the series of four email messages, the Board of Trustees, which normally rubber stamps tenure recommendations already endorsed by the faculty, twice delayed Hannah-Jones’s tenure vote, once in November and once in January. In the latter instance, the deferral was due in part to , according to reporting from the News & Observer. In February, the university offered Hannah-Jones a five-year contract, breaking the precedent of offering tenure packages to previous Knight Chairs.

In late June, following widespread protests amid reports that North Carolina’s flagship university had , the university reversed course. The board June 30.

After initially accepting the university’s five-year offer, Hannah-Jones, a 2017 recipient of a MacArthur genius grant, reconsidered when it became clear that her tenure process had been marred by what she called “political interference.” The 1619 Project creator eventually , instead joining the faculty of historically BlackHoward University, alongside author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Hannah-Jones, an alumna of UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism school, did not respond to ����Ӱ��’s requests for comment.

“I cannot imagine working at and advancing a school named for a man who lobbied against me,” Hannah-Jones wrote in an early July published through the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which represented her.

Her new initiative at Howard, the Center for Journalism and Democracy, “will help produce journalists capable of accurately and urgently covering the perilous challenges of our democracy with a clarity, skepticism, rigor, and historical dexterity that is too often missing from today’s journalism,” she said.

Details on Hussman’s emails below: