A proposed bill of rights aimed at protecting college students from political indoctrination in the classroom is being actively debated in more than 20 states, including New York.

The “Academic Bill of Rights” calls for students to be graded based on their reasoning and not their political beliefs. The measure also requires that professors offer diverse reading lists and “not use their courses for the purpose of political, ideological, religious or anti-religious indoctrination.”

The proposal, which was drafted by a conservative author and activist from California, David Horowitz, also seeks to upend ideological conformity on campuses by insisting that decisions to hire and fire be made without regard to an academic’s political views.

“We have a political pollution of our universities which is extensive,” Mr. Horowitz said in an interview. “The Academic Bill of Rights was devised to meet that problem, to help remedy that problem without injuring the fabric of the university itself, its independence in particular.”

Mr. Horowitz said his campaign for the measure has been bolstered by recent controversies about what he described as “extremist” professors at Columbia University and the University of Colorado.

Columbia is investigating allegations that professors in the school’s Middle East studies department acted inappropriately toward students who expressed pro-Israel views.

And last week, Hamilton College in upstate New York canceled a speech by the then-chairman of the ethnic studies department at the University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, after it was disclosed that he had compared the victims of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center to the notorious Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Governor Pataki called Mr. Churchill “a bigoted terrorist supporter.”

The University of Colorado backed off a threat to postpone a speech yesterday by Mr. Churchill after he went to federal court to challenge the decision. The school said students who claimed there were death threats had changed their stories. Governor Owens has called for Mr. Churchill to be fired, and the school is investigating whether he can be.

As the proposed bill of rights has progressed through state legislatures and boards of regents, it has prompted an outcry from academics and civil-liberties groups who warn that the measure could lead to witch hunts against unpopular professors.

“It does have some of the feel of 1952 to it,” said the executive director of the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, Christine Link. Ms. Link is fighting legislation introduced last month in the Ohio Senate that would impose the bill of rights on public and private universities in the state. “The government is setting itself up to be the censor and determiner of thought and speech on campuses that reflect every viewpoint from extreme right to extreme left,” she said.

University students are sophisticated enough to determine whether their instructors are offering a particular point of view, Ms. Link said. “This is college. It’s not elementary school, and students don’t take what’s given to them by faculty without raising questions on their own,” she said.

A Massachusetts lawyer who fights free speech restrictions on college campuses, Harvey Silverglate, said Mr. Horowitz’s complaints about liberal orthodoxy in academia are well-founded, but his proposal to remedy the problem is seriously flawed.

“I actually think it’s a very bad idea even though I am very sympathetic with the goal,” said Mr. Silverglate, who is a founder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. “The problem with the Horowitz proposal is it simply engages in more of the same, in that you have somebody sitting there taking a litmus test of what the ideological views are of a faculty member,” the attorney said.

Mr. Silverglate said the proposal could also force some well-respected professors to water down politically charged course content. A robust public discussion of the issue would be more productive than any written bill of rights, he said. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” he said.

A member of the SUNY board of trustees, Candace de Russy, is urging that the state system adopt a version of the academic bill of rights. At a trustees’ meeting last month, Ms. de Russy urged that studies be conducted on how the “eloquent” language of the bill could be incorporated into policies at SUNY campuses.

“Today’s campuses respect every kind of diversity but the one most central to the mission of higher education, namely, intellectual diversity,” Ms. de Russy complained yesterday. She said the measure would help reverse an orthodoxy that developed after “60s leftists commandeered and politicized higher education.”

In other states, efforts to adopt the bill of rights have faced strong resistance from academics.

“I’ve been surprised by the vehement negative response I’ve received from many professors,” said a Republican state representative from Indiana, Luke Messer. “They believe we’re trying to create thought police.”

Mr. Messer said he introduced a version of the bill to encourage more balance at Indiana universities. “At many universities, they’re getting only extreme liberal views in the classroom,” the legislator said. “The problem could be a little larger than even I at first realized.”

The Indiana bill is pending before the Legislature’s education committee and may or may not get a hearing, Mr. Messer said.

An Indiana state senator, Larry Mumper, said he was prompted to introduce similar legislation after hearing stories from students about professors making extensive political comments during class time.

Mr. Mumper acknowledged that his bill needs to be revised to address First Amendment issues raised by attempts to regulate teaching at private colleges. He also said devising a sensible and workable grievance procedure is difficult. “If I go in and whine about a professor because I got a bad grade, they’ve got to be able to differentiate,” Mr. Mumper said. “That’s something I’ve got attorneys working on.”

In Colorado, after a version of the bill of rights was passed by a legislative committee, state universities adopted much of the language to head off further action by lawmakers. The proposal gained momentum there after a student at the University of Northern Colorado reported that a question asked on her criminology exam was: “Explain why George Bush is a war criminal.” The student told legislators that she received an “F” after substituting an essay on why Saddam Hussein should be considered a war criminal.

The American Association of University Professors has described Mr. Horowitz’s campaign as “dangerous. “A member of that group, Graham Larkin, who has written about the measure, said it would lead to a parade of horribles, including “the infantilization of students, the specter of epistemological and moral relativism, the increased politicization of intellectual disputes, and the replacement of a model of mutual understanding with one of incommensurable differences.”

Mr. Larkin, a lecturer in the art history department at Stanford, dismissed the notion that leftists control academia. In an e-mailed response to questions from The New York Sun, he wrote, “My office is literally in the shadow of the Hoover Tower.”

A group organized by Mr. Horowitz to promote the bill of rights, Students for Academic Freedom, now boasts chapters on more than 130 campuses. The group’s national campus director, Sara Dolan, scoffed at claims that the measure amounts to affirmative action for conservatives. “We don’t talk about balance. We don’t talk about quotas,” she said.

While some academics have suggested that the bill will prompt unprecedented intrusion into the classroom, Ms. Dolan sees that argument as disingenuous. “When it comes to cultural or ethnic diversity, schools already have these incredibly complex bureaucracies set up to deal with these issues,” she said. “It shouldn’t be difficult for schools to set up something.”