The State of California has started a political protest that threatens to split higher education into two factions: red vs. blue. It's a disconcerting precedent. In the worst-case scenario, we will have an academy that's as fractured as our news ecosystem. Political partisans on the right and the left don't read the same news anymore. If the State of California has its way, researchers in blue states won't work with researchers in red states, either.
On January 1st 2017, Assembly Bill 1887 went into effect throughout the state of California. That law bans state-funded travel to any state deemed to sanction discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Initially, the law was narrowly tailored to respond to allegedly unjust overreach in a single state. As such, the effect of the law was pretty minimal.
Not anymore. Before long, twelve more states were added to the list. And a year and a half after the law came into effect, Florida and five other states were deemed in violation of California's standards. And as of August 2022, the list of states had grown to 23. For reference, here's Stanislaus State's explanation of the law and a catalog of currently blacklisted states. As the list makes clear, state employees are currently prohibited from visiting half of the country on state-funded trips.
There isn't a consensus on the justification for the law. The author of the law says the point of the ban is to protect state workers by keeping them out of harms way. The idea is that the State of California would not force its employees to travel to states where they might face discrimination. That's understandable, but it's a lousy justification for a wholesale travel ban.
If the goal is to protect employees, all you need is to protect their right to refuse to travel to any given state. If you fear unjust discrimination in a particular state, you have the right to refuse to go there on state business. If you don't fear unjust discrimination in that locale, you're free to travel. This would allow 99% of California employees to continue to travel and do business anywhere in the country on state-sponsored trips while protecting the vulnerable from discrimination. On the other hand, a blanket travel ban is overkill for such a narrow goal.
Worse, the state's attorney general offers a completely different justification for the ban. It's not about protecting California state employees from unjust discrimination. Instead, he explicitly notes that California should avoid financing states that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community or have overly strict abortion regulations. That makes it sound like the issue is one of money. If another state treats its citizens with less respect than they deserve, California will--in effect--boycott that state. Just as nations sanction others that don't live up to their moral standards, so too, California sanctions other states that don't live up to theirs. It's an understandable justification. No one wants their resources to finance an unjust regime.
But imagine what happens when states begin to reciprocate. Suppose the Florida legislature decides that it doesn't want to finance conferences in states where fetuses are executed in the third trimester of pregnancies. Or Missouri decides it won't fund travel to states that offer gender-affirming care to minors. Or universities in Texas won't reimburse employees for travel to immigration sanctuary cities. This kind of tit-for-tat boycotting could get out of hand quickly.
Set aside the question of how a just government will handle cases of sex or gender discrimination or abortion restrictions. We don't have to address those tough issues to see why the California ban is a bad idea.
Here's the crucial question: what sort of cooperation we should encourage while states sort out moral issues on which they disagree? The pretty obvious answer is as much cooperation as possible, especially among our best and brightest. Yet California's answer is to stifle cooperation across partisan lines. That amounts to a kind of state-sponsored segregation.
This issue hits home for me because I'm a state-funded academic. I'm a philosopher working at a public college in Colorado. I work with academics all across the country and in many other places around the world. That's true for most of my colleagues as well. In order to do our work well, we need to collaborate with other scholars, and that sometimes means meeting in person for workshops, conferences, and other academic events.
Yet California's travel ban now stands in the way of that sort of collaboration. Suppose you're a chemist at Cal Poly wanting to present your findings at a national chemistry conference in Texas. Sorry. Or a philosopher invited to attend a cutting edge epistemology workshop in Florida. Hope it comes with funding. Or a creative writer who has a book selected for an author-meets-critic session at a national gathering in a red state. Maybe you can do it remotely?
In response to the California travel ban, academic conferences are being cancelled, relocated, or shifted online in order to placate the will of the California legislature. The effect of this cancellation is the creation of an academic caste system: red vs. blue. Before you submit a paper to a conference or request funding from your dean, you need to make sure that your school is on the same political team. That's insane.
In a time of unprecedented political polarization, we need people from blue states talking with people in red states more, not less. We need professors employed at public universities to be able to travel anywhere in the country to talk about ideas, present their data, and argue for theories. In other words, if we really believe in the power of education, we need more dialog, not less. That makes California's travel ban both unjustified and harmful.
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