Hopefully a serious academic could demolish those ideas, especially in formal debate where some youtube dimwit can't simply shout their opposition down with ad hominems and shitty motte and bailey arguments. Since its a public and not private university, yes it does make good sense to say that they should offer a properly mediated space for the debate of controversial topics.

this is a very famous ‘etc.’ it’s notably topics are 1. holocaust denial 2. climate change denial 3. racism denial 4. race realism 5. birds aren’t real and are government drones 6. israel should be nuked 7. israel should be given all the funding and jews in the world to bring about the apocalypse 8. time cube 9. someone else explaining time cube 10. vaccines cause austism 11. the sun moves around the earth 12. russia good 13. russia bad 13. Finland doesn’t exist and finally, the most famous of all the moon is made out of cheese

“you see, the Nazis were actually the good guys because they took records of them killing people”

It's one of those things that sounds nice out of context. First, it's not just debates, it's also lectures and panels. So Charles Murray could give a lecture on the virtues of superior cranial capacity unchallenged, unlike with the debate format. Second, the way it's designed is actually to be a drain on university resources. Universities will have to front the money for these events and even cheap speakers can rack up expenses quickly if you're paying for things like plane tickets, etc. The bill in the OP in particular specifies that there will be no new hires for this hypothetical new office so it will also further strain administrative staff. Third, making it completely policy-oriented is convenient for corporate sponsors as they already have hordes of "policy analysts" at ~~propaganda mills~~ think tanks lined up to do these things. On top of that, universities would now be paying their speaking fees more than they already do. Fourth, even the better-sounding parts (providing content to the public for free) has ulterior motives. This part of the legislation is designed essentially for surveillance purposes, i.e., is your content ~~right-wing~~ "intellectually diverse" enough according to some lunatic state senator? This reminds me of the abandoned [Youcut](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouCut) program from the Tea Party days, which was proposed to have a feature that would let The People cut specific NSF grants via a centralized database, i.e., defund evolutionary biology and climate science. The bills look very similar to the higher ed proposals in the [Powell memo](https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/) minus the Chamber of Commerce directly auditing textbook content.

>Especially when professors able and willing to advocate for a particular position are thin on the ground on campus, the university would invite guest speakers to take a given side in the debates. In other words mandatory representation from unqualified individuals to represent bad fucking ideas "campus freeze peach" is an old conservative dogwhistle that really means "we demand to have pro life and alt right rallies on university grounds without being protested" "Free and healthy debate" is an old dogwhistle for "My shitty conservative ideas are equally as good as your progressive ideas and the government should step in to mandate that we present them as equally valid" when in actuality these ideas belong in the garbage bin of history with fascism, Toryism, royalism, neoliberalism, and so on. Universities don't hold "debates" between flat earthers and conventional astronomers because it would be incredibly stupid, they don't hold "debates" about climate change because it's a fact, and so on. The intention of this law is to shoehorn conservative ideology into universities by state mandate under the pretense of free speech.

Will the public debate actually host a wide range of views? For example, will a debate on the war in the middle east invite government official in Assad's Ba'ath party to give their perspective? Or is this just going to be democrats vs republicans like every single political debate in the US?

Debates in particular are often not terribly valuable educational fora. They favor slogans and charisma over legitimate intellectual engagement. More generally, the big problem with this particular agenda is that it repackages "replicating current US political divisions" as "intellectual diversity." In fact, contemporary universities typically have lots of people who defend laissez faire/neoliberal economic positions etc. Because there is significant intellectual content (for better or worse) to those positions and the debate around them. Universities rarely have many defenders of young-Earth creationism, by contrast, because that family of views lacks intellectual content. Increasing the number of YEC people presenting on campus would thus increase some kind of diversity, but not "intellectual" diversity. Is the intellectual climate of a university improved or undermined by increasing the number of QAnon or chemtrails events? Because these sorts of legislation would rank such as increased diversity.

Did you look at the actual model legislation? It's not about sponsoring more frequent debate per se—the operative elements are these: > particular attention to inviting participants from outside the institution who hold perspectives on widely debated public policy issues otherwise poorly represented on campus > honoraria, travel, and lodging expenses to participants in debates, group forums, and individual lectures organized by the Office of Public Policy Events, from outside the campus community > Making publicly available a complete Internet-accessible video record of every debate, group forum, and individual lecture organized by the Office of Public Policy Events, mounting that video record on the Internet within ten in-session working days of the event in question, and maintaining that video record in a fully public, Internet-accessible form for at least five years following the date of the event And, of course: > funding for these offices can be taken out of the existing university appropriation It's not about generating more frequent debate. It's about building a robust platform for Richard Spencer (or whomever) and making the public university system pay for it.