BISMARCK, North Dakota (LifeSiteNews) – North Dakota Republican Gov. Doug Burgum signed into law Monday a measure forbidding state colleges and universities from requiring students, employees, applicants, and potential hires from being forced to conform to left-wing ideology.
SB 2247 prohibits students or employees of public higher-ed institutions from being “[p]enalized, discriminated against,” or otherwise mistreated for refusing to “support, believe, endorse, embrace, confess, act upon, or otherwise assent to or oppose a specified concept”; “[r]equired to endorse or oppose a specific ideology or political viewpoint to be eligible for hiring, tenure, promotion, or graduation”; or asked for their “ideological or political viewpoint” as a condition of hiring or admission.
It also forbids mandating or financially incentivizing training in the “specified concepts,” and requires any existing diversity officers to incorporate into their work “efforts to strengthen and increase intellectual diversity among students and faculty.”
The “specified concepts” at issue include the beliefs that certain races or sexes are “inherently superior or inferior” and/or “inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously”; that an individual’s race or sex warrants “adverse treatment,” determines their “moral character,” or carries blame for “action committed in the past by other members of the same race or sex”; that North Dakota or America are “fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist”; that the U.S. government should be violently overthrown; that the “rule of law does not exist but instead is a series of power relationships and struggles among racial or other groups”; that “Americans are not created equal and are not endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and that governments should “should deny to any person within the government’s jurisdiction the equal protection of the law.”
The bill clarifies that it forbids the promotion or forced adoption of the aforementioned views, but does not prohibit faculty from teaching, researching, or writing about them.
Burgum signed SB 2247 without public fanfare, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported. It takes effect August 1.
The new law is part of a nationwide trend against left-wing indoctrination in higher education, sparked in large part by public outrage against the prevalence of critical race theory (CRT), a divisive academic doctrine that holds race is a “socially constructed (culturally invented) category that is used to oppress and exploit people of color,” and that “racism is inherent in the law and legal institutions of the United States insofar as they function to create and maintain social, economic, and political inequalities between whites and nonwhites, especially African Americans.”