(REPORT) — As Republican-dominated state governments push frightening right-wing legislation nationwide, a GOP senator in Iowa joined the fray on Monday with a bill that would force universities to exclusively hire Republican professors and temporarily bar Democrats until « partisan balanced » is reached.
The bill, Senate File 288, « could bring about a Soviet-style purge of liberal-leaning college staff in Iowa, » warned Pat Rynard in the local politics blog Iowa Starting Line.
« The obvious impact and purpose of this bill would be to ban Democrats from getting hired anymore at Iowa colleges, » Rynard continued. « If you took a survey right now, it’s highly likely that Iowa professors are registered as Democrats at a much higher rate than Republican. So any new hires would be strictly limited to Republican or [n]o [p]arty voters. »
Iowa state senator Mark Chelgren, who introduced the legislation, defended it to the Des Moines Register by arguing that students « should be able to go to their professors, ask opinions, and they should know publicly whether that professor is a Republican or Democrat or no-party affiliation. »
Rynard, however, wondered: « What good would it do to ban a highly qualified physics professor applicant simply because they’re registered as a Democrat? »
« We do have a Constitution and it’s there for a reason, and it’s to try to protect equity and to make sure that we don’t judge people on the basis of their race or religion, their creed, their political beliefs, » said Mary Mascher, a Democratic state representative whose district includes the University of Iowa, to the Des Moines Register.
« We never ask that question when someone’s hired: Are you a Republican, Democrat, or independent, or Green Party or socialist or any of that, » Mascher added. « And I think that would be clearly discriminatory. »
« The most disturbing aspect of Chelgren’s legislation […] is that it is outright fascist, » Rynard noted. « Republicans haven’t even spent two full months in power at the Iowa Statehouse and they’re already trying to impose a one-party rule in the state in perpetuity. You’re a registered Democrat? You’re banned from getting a job. »
A similar amendment in North Carolina, which would have required « ideological balance in faculty hiring, » was blocked earlier this month.
And the Iowa bill comes only a few weeks after the Republican-dominated legislature proposed ending tenure at state institutions and destroying collective bargaining rights in two previous bills, Inside Higher Ed notes.
Read Iowa Senate File 288 below:
https://www.mintpressnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/iowa-partisan-bill.pdf
This work by Common Dreams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.