What you should know about Indiana Senate Bill 202:

This bill, passed on March 13, 2024, “Amends the duties of state educational institutions’ diversity committees” and dictates that “diversity programming must include within the mission of the office or position programming that substantially promotes both cultural and intellectual diversity” (Legiscan, 2024, para. 1). Because it has long been a goal of Project 2025 to expand diversity initiatives.

At first the bill sounds positive; it's a masterclass in legislative doublespeak. Rather than promoting a friendly cousin of academic freedom, SB202 uses "intellectual diversity" perversely. The bill's true intent is to undermine faculty and litigate academic speech. This may not surprise our readers, given the unprecedented attacks on higher education that the Trump administration initiated ASAP once he was reelected, but the one-year anniversary of the insidious Indiana bill is just around the corner. 

According to Wiseman and Rosenzweig (2024), Senate Bill 202 has “received near-universal condemnations from faculty organizations at many of the state’s public universities” (para. 1) because SB202 places faculty evaluation and review of tenure in the hands of Indiana state universities’ boards of trustees, not faculty. Another of its goals is to prevent universities from stating officially their political or ethical positions while creating efficient channels through which students can rat on their professors for using language too far out of tune with dubious "intellectual diversity." Here's one such portal at the federal level: https://archive.ph/R5S8u. 

Another overarching, unsurprising goal of SB202 is to "forbid all state universities and colleges to admit students, hire, promote, or renew faculty who include statements on diversity, equity, and inclusion in their materials” (Ball State University AAUP, 2023, para. 4-5). There's a lot to unpack with just that one citation.

A major problem with “intellectual diversity” is that it's merely a dressed-up "viewpoint diversity"--with executive powers.

Clarifying our new national syllabus, then, Lane (2025) asks, "Should a history professor teaching about 9/11 be required to present theories suggesting the U.S. government was behind the attacks, simply to provide a 'diverse' viewpoint? Should a biology professor be forced to give equal weight and lecture time to flat-earth theories to avoid accusations of bias?”

Now in session: Politically motivated relativism (either/or-ism) that pressures faculty to teach bogus theories and thereby check a mental box, mislabeled by Project 2025 as “intellectually diverse."

Sure, SB202 works against freedom of speech in Higher Ed and in the U.S. more broadly and thus in the entire world, but it is worth reading as a rhetorical exercise, an example of persuasive communication whose tendrils may at our shore soon arrive: https://legiscan.com/IN/bill/SB0202/2024. 

Why this matters:

Purdue Global is an online institution, but our parent campus, Purdue University, lives in Indiana and is by no means immune to SB202 and the heinous bills that will soon follow.

What you can do:

Join Purdue Global’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (PG-AAUP) to give and receive emotional, educational support during the inevitable fallout of SB202 et al. Sign up for AAUP national, and then select Purdue University Global from the dropdown list. If you're still not sure how your voice will make an impact, why not talk to us directly over at Slack?

Advocacy always,

Faculty Voice

References:

Ball State University, (2023). Press release on Indiana SB 202. https://bsuaaup.com/press-release/

Lane, J. (2025, February 20). Yes – Higher education needs reform. SB202 isn’t the answer. Herald-Times. https://archive.ph/6v9fI

Legiscan. (2024). Indiana senate bill 202. https://legiscan.com/IN/bill/SB0202/2024

Wiseman, K. & Rosenzweigh, B. (2024). What to know about SB202, which could impact tenure, free speech at public universities. Indianapolis Star. https://archive.ph/a9LDz