Program Review Act

Introduction

State legislatures, state boards of trustees, and boards of trustees should defund programs and departments that are activist pseudodisciplines rather than genuine exercises in intellectual inquiry. Radical activists have used “academic freedom” as a camouflage to protect political activism at best thinly disguised as scholarship. Many “Studies” departments in particular, such as Ethnic Studies or Gender Studies, explicitly state that their discipline aims to change the world rather than to understand it. Citizens and policymakers are not obliged to fund activists pretending to be professors.

Our model Program Review Act establishes a Task Force to review all undergraduate and graduate academic programs offered at a public university system. This review, especially tasked to distinguish real disciplines from activist pseudodisciplines, will provide the information that policymakers need to determine which academic programs and departments should be discontinued and defunded.

Notes

Defunding

We do not provide a mechanism for actually defunding programs. We suspect that state policymakers will not want to delegate that decision. Our Act will give state policymakers the information they need to determine which programs should be defunded; state policymakers will then decide themselves what to do with that information. Policymakers, however, may choose to add a mechanism for automatic defunding to this bill.

Appointments

This act envisions a Task Force appointed solely by the governor. Every state will choose an appropriate mechanism to staff the Task Force—one alternate might be appointments jointly by the Governor, the President of the Senate, and the Speaker of the House. The most important thing is that the Task Force members not be chosen by the permanent bureaucracy of the state education department or the state Board of Regents. Education bureaucracies are part of the education establishment that must be reformed; they should not be entrusted with the task of carrying out so major a reform themselves. Whoever appoints the Task Force, its members should be chosen directly by policymakers, to ensure their dedication to the spirit of this Act.

Rationale

The Task Force might also judge programs based on metrics such as “contribution to workforce development.” Activist pseudodisciplines presumably would fail such metrics. But we believe that state policymakers should forthrightly state that activist pseudodisciplines ought to be discontinued and deserve no public support. We will not object to alternate wording that achieves substantially the same end, but we think that directness is the best way to achieve this goal.

Model Legislative Text

1. There is created within the Department of Education the Program Review Task Force. Members of the task force shall be appointed by the Governor.
2. No later than the first meeting of the {State Board of Regents} occurring on or after {January 1, 2026}, the task force shall complete a review of all undergraduate and graduate academic programs offered at institutions of higher education governed by the {State Board of Education}. The purpose of the review shall be to determine whether and to what extent each academic program engages in free, open, and rigorous intellectual inquiry to seek the truth.
3. The task force shall judge whether an academic program engages in free, open, and rigorous intellectual inquiry to seek the truth by assessing whether that program, and its larger academic discipline are:
   1. a subdivision of knowledge that addresses a distinctive subject, sufficiently separate from other areas of inquiry to warrant focused attention;
   2. including the acquisition of new facts and evidence through scrupulous forms of inquiry that are capable of distinguishing between real, illusory, mistaken, and fraudulent claims;
   3. using a set of methods that have substantially proven their validity by withstanding both critical scrutiny and empirical validation;
   4. aiming to pursue a true understanding of the world and not to achieve power by changing the world;
   5. constituted by intellectual pluralism, free and fearless debate, about the best means by which to pursue that knowledge, and not predicated upon a particular theory; and
   6. staffed by professors whose professional culture, above all their teaching and hiring decisions, incarnate the pursuit of truth and intellectual pluralism.
4. The task force shall submit a report on the results of the review to the governor and the general assembly no later than {July 4, 2026}. For each academic program reviewed, the report shall recommend that the program remain unchanged, recommend that the program be discontinued, or recommend that the program be changed and describe recommended changes.
5. If any provision of this chapter, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this chapter and the application of its provisions to any other person or circumstance shall not be affected thereby.

Existing State Statutes and Proposed Bills

• Iowa House Study Bill 50 (2025)

The National Association of Scholars, in consultation with other supporters and friends of the Civics Alliance, drafted these model bills to translate into legislative language the principles in the Civics Alliance’s Civics Curriculum Statement & Open Letter. Just as these bills have been drafted with the expectation that different states will modify them as they see fit, they also have been drafted with the expectation that not every supporter of the Civics Alliance will endorse these bills or every part of them. Individual Civics Alliance signatories and supporters should not be assumed to have endorsed these bills, unless they say so explicitly.