•HCON 318 IH 
in question, and before he has sufficient knowledge and 
ripeness of judgment to be entitled to form any definitive 
opinion of his own’’; 
Whereas in 1967, the American Association of University 
Professors’ Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of 
Students reinforced and amplified this injunction by af-
firming the inseparability of ‘‘the freedom to teach and 
freedom to learn’’; and 
Whereas in the words of the joint statement, ‘‘[s]tudents 
should be free to take reasoned exception to the data or 
views offered in any course of study and to reserve judg-
ment about matters of opinion’’: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate 
concurring), That, to secure the intellectual independence 
of faculty members and students and to protect the prin-
ciple of intellectual diversity— 
(1) the Congress encourages all public and pri-
vate colleges and universities in the United States to 
adopt an Academic Bill of Rights and to observe the 
following principles and procedures—
(A) all faculty members will be hired, fired, 
promoted, and granted tenure on the basis of 
their competence and appropriate knowledge in 
the field of their expertise and, in the human-
ities, the social sciences, and the arts, with a 
view toward fostering a plurality of methodolo-
gies and perspectives;
•HCON 318 IH 
(B) no faculty member will be hired, fired, 
or denied promotion or tenure on the basis of 
his or her political, ideological, or religious be-
liefs; 
(C) no faculty member will be excluded 
from tenure, search, and hiring committees on 
the basis of his or her political, ideological, or 
religious beliefs; 
(D) students will be graded solely on the 
basis of their reasoned answers and appropriate 
knowledge of the subjects and disciplines they 
study, not on the basis of their political, ideo-
logical, or religious beliefs; 
(E) curricula and reading lists in the hu-
manities and social sciences will respect the un-
certainty and unsettled character of all human 
knowledge in these areas and provide students 
with dissenting sources and viewpoints; 
(F) while teachers are and should be free 
to pursue their own findings and perspectives in 
presenting their views, they should consider and 
make their students aware of other viewpoints; 
(G) academic disciplines should welcome a 
diversity of approaches to unsettled questions;
•HCON 318 IH 
(H) exposing students to the spectrum of 
significant scholarly viewpoints on the subjects 
examined in their courses is a major responsi-
bility of faculty members; 
(I) faculty members will not use their 
courses or their positions for the purpose of po-
litical, ideological, religious, or antireligious in-
doctrination; 
(J) selection of speakers, allocation of 
funds for speakers’ programs, and other stu-
dent activities will observe the principles of aca-
demic freedom and promote intellectual plu-
ralism; 
(K) because an environment conducive to 
the civil exchange of ideas is an essential com-
ponent of a free university, the obstruction of 
invited campus speakers, the destruction of 
campus literature, and other efforts to obstruct 
this exchange will not be tolerated; 
(L) academic institutions and professional 
societies should maintain a posture of organiza-
tional neutrality with respect to the substantive 
disagreements that divide researchers on ques-
tions within, or outside, their fields of inquiry, 
recognizing that—
•HCON 318 IH 
(i) knowledge advances when indi-
vidual scholars are left free to reach their 
own conclusions about which methods, 
facts, and theories have been validated by 
research; and 
(ii) academic institutions and profes-
sional societies formed to advance knowl-
edge within an area of research, maintain 
the integrity of the research process, and 
organize the professional lives of related 
researchers serve as indispensable venues 
within which scholars circulate research 
findings and debate their interpretation; 
and 
(2) the Congress recognizes that the principles 
and procedures described in paragraph (1) fully 
apply only to public universities and to private uni-
versities that present themselves as bound by the 
canons of academic freedom; and 
(3) it is the sense of the Congress that private 
institutions choosing to restrict academic freedom on 
the basis of creed have an obligation to be as explicit 
as is possible about the scope and nature of these 
restrictions.
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