PHOENIX (CN) — An Arizona House committee pushed forward a bill that would establish a grade appeal process for university students who believe their grades were affected by political bias, despite Arizona’s public universities already having those mechanisms in place.
State Senator Anthony Kern — sparked by recent debate over freedom of speech at Arizona State University — sponsored SB1477 to give conservative students a way to challenge grades they claim are deflated because of their own political beliefs.
“Some of these students, to my understanding, are feeling the need to lie about their political beliefs so that they get good grades,” state Representative Rachel Jones said in a House Committee on Education meeting Tuesday afternoon. “To me this seems like a very small step to give those students the support they might need.”
The Republican from Tucson was one of four Republicans on the committee to support the bill. The three Democrats voted against it.
Kern, a Republican from Glendale, wasn’t present to explain his bill, but said in an ad hoc committee on freedom of expression in July 2023 that he doesn’t trust the universities not to “indoctrinate” students with “woke ideology.”
His bill circumvents existing appeals procedures at the university level to establish a “grade challenge department” within the Arizona Board of Regents, the governing body for Arizona’s three public universities. The bill would require the board to appoint volunteers to staff an office at each of the universities to hear appeals from students. Students could appeal the decision of that department directly to the board of regents itself.
Thomas Adkins, the board’s vice president of government affairs and community relations, told the committee Tuesday that the board would struggle to staff those offices, given it has only about 40 full-time employees.
Each institution has its own grade appeal process. At Arizona State University, the University of Arizona and Northern Arizona University, appeals begin with an informal discussion between the student and the professor. From there, appeals can be taken to the head of the professor’s respective department and from there to the dean or provost of the specific college.
“We think this process works,” Adkins told the committee. “Our preferred approach would be to identify improvements within the existing framework and go from there, rather than creating a separate system staffed by volunteers that creates a burden.”
He said he’s unsure of what specific changes would be made, but that it would differ depending on the institution.
Kern chaired a committee last year that met three times to discuss the apparent suppression of free speech and academic freedom on Arizona campuses. Francisco Pedraza, a political science professor at Arizona State University, said the bill would go against the historical understanding of academic freedom.
“Academic freedom is meant to capture the independence of scholars and thinkers from a bigger political context,” he said in an interview with Courthouse News. “If that academic freedom is to operate in a way that is meaningful, you need to have some degree of independence for the institutions. They need to have their own set of policies and procedures to self-monitor and guide their conduct among their affiliates.”
By escalating grade appeals outside of the universities, he said, the bill runs the risk of eliminating long-standing traditions of independence. He added allowing academic peers to monitor and give feedback to one another is better than allowing outside influences to curb academic thought.
“That’s why [ASU President Michael] Crow doesn’t say what I get to teach in my classroom,” he said. “I get to decide that.”
In most classes, especially those in STEM fields, it’s unlikely that political opinions would create controversy in the classroom. But even for those in which it’s possible, like social sciences and humanities classes, Pedraza said grade appeals in general are “overwhelmingly rare.”
Because class syllabi and assignment rubrics spell out expectations and grading scales, he said there isn’t much room, if any, for political beliefs to get in the way of objective evaluations.
“That’s why for 99% of students, a grade appeal is never even considered,” he said.
The controversy at ASU began when 34 professors wrote an open letter to the university denouncing the school's invitation to conservative talk show hosts Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk to host a speaker event. The letter spelled out numerous examples of racist and homophobic rhetoric from the two.
Kern and other Republicans on the committee were quick to decry the characterizations of the two as racists, homophobes and white supremacists, complaining that the letter suppressed freedom of speech. The speaker event went on as planned.
Pedraza reminded that academic freedom comes with limits.
“Academic freedom doesn’t extend to us being harmful to our students,” he said. “Racist and sexist language at its core is exclusive. If you bring somebody in who wants to espouse that, what you’re doing by inviting them in is giving some level of support of that view.”
The bill, already passed by the state Senate, will now go to a full House vote.
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