Iowa:
The party affiliation on your voter registration card could block you from employment at Iowa’s state universities were a newly proposed bill by Senator Mark Chelgren to become law. Senate File 288, proposed by the Ottumwa legislator, could bring about a Soviet-style purge of liberal-leaning college staff in Iowa. Chelgren wants to impose an ideological litmus test in order to create a “partisan balance,” based on how Iowa has voted in past elections.
The legislation proposes that a “person shall not be hired as a professor or instructor member of the faculty at such an institution if the person’s political party affiliation on the date of hire would cause the percentage of faculty belonging to one political party to exceed by ten percent the percentage of faculty belonging to the other political party.”
I’ve been through a few job searches. We are not allowed to ask about personal matters: no conversations about family, sexual preference, religion, or political affiliation. We are supposed to judge the ability of the person to do the job entirely on their ability to do the job. It will sometimes come up if the job candidate brings it up, but we do not get to use that information at all in our evaluation. If I even tried to make a comment in our recommendation like “We should hire because they are a nice liberal atheist lesbian who hates Trump almost as much as I do!”, or “We should not hire because they voted against my interests”, I would probably get hauled up in front of a review committee and chastised, not to mention that if that comment were revealed to any of the other candidates who did not get the job, I’d get my butt sued.
Chelgren doesn’t have a clue about how university hiring works. He’s a Republican, of course.