The following article was originally published in the Ohio Capital Journal and published on News5Cleveland.com under a content-sharing agreement.
Ohio college students and faculty members are slamming a bill proposed by Republican lawmakers that would ban diversity and inclusion efforts, prevent faculty from striking, set rules around classroom discussion, and imperil scholarships, among other things.
State Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, introduced Senate Bill 1 last week which would also require post-tenure reviews, has a retrenchment provision that block unions from negotiating on tenure and has a policy around “controversial beliefs.” It would also shorten university board of trustees terms from nine years down to six years and require students to take an American history course.
State Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Twp., introduced House Bill 6, the companion bill to S.B. 1.
“We don’t know how to get it across that the students of Ohio don’t want this bill,” said Nica Delgado, a senior at Kent State University. “We’re not going to stop fighting it.”
As S.B. 1, this bill is the top priority of the Senate Republican majority.
“The fact that they have chosen a culture war education bill to start off with in this General Assembly really shows that they’re out of touch with what Ohioans really want their lawmakers to be doing,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors.
Administrative redundancy is the one of the biggest problems with the bill, she said.
“It tries to dictate what institutions have already figured out how to do well for themselves,” Kilpatrick said. “It dictates evaluation policies, tenure policies, retrenchment policies, and various other things that institutions are already doing. We’re questioning why we need this one-size-fits-all set of mandates from the state when our diverse institutions have already determined what works well for them.”
S.B. 1 prohibits collective bargaining over university evaluations of faculty and prohibits bargaining over post-tenure review policies, said David Jackson, president of Bowling Green State University’s AAUP chapter.
“From a collective bargaining standpoint, there’s nothing more fundamental than the right to negotiate over the terms and conditions of employment,” he said.
Diversity and Inclusion
The bill would essentially ban all diversity, equity and inclusion offices, training, orientations and scholarships on college campuses. The sole exception is if such training is required to comply with state and federal law, professional licensure requirements, or receiving accreditation or grants.
“The vast majority of our institutions that have DEI programs are really about student success and helping underrepresented students graduate with a degree,” Kilpatrick said. “We are concerned that this broad stroke of completely eliminating DEI is going to hurt those underrepresented students who are already more at risk for not achieving a degree.”
Delgado, who is eligible for minority based scholarships, said she would lose her diversity scholarships if the bill were to pass.
“I have been able to get through college without any student loan debt and that is because of the opportunities that have been afforded to me by those quote-unquote DEI scholarships,” she said.
She originally planned on staying at Kent State for graduate school, but is now considering going out-of-state.
“I don’t think, if this legislation continues, Ohio is going to be a place where I can get a quality education that will get me quality jobs when I graduate,” she said. “If (S.B. 1) passes, I’m not going to be able to get the money for (college).”
Controversial beliefs
S.B. 1 defines controversial beliefs as “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion,” according to the bill.
The bill would allow students to “affirm and declare that faculty and staff shall allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious point of view.”
As an example, Steve Mockabee, president of the University of Cincinnati’s AAUP chapter, said this bill would force him to teach about various debunked conspiracy theories regarding election fraud in his elections class.
“You have to entertain all sides of controversial subjects as though they’re equally valid,” he said. “But the big problem with that is, as academics, our primary role is to correct misunderstandings.”
Academic freedom would not be protected if S.B. 1 passed, Mockabee said.
“Faculty are going to be afraid to speak up,” he said. “They’re going to be worried about speaking honestly in classrooms about controversial topics.”
Anti-striking
University faculty would be banned from striking under the bill.
Higher education strikes aren’t that common in Ohio. Youngstown State University workers went on strike for a few days in 2020 over pay disputes, and Wright State University went on strike for almost three weeks in January 2019 over pay disputes and health care.
“Faculty hate the thought of striking because they know that it messes up their classes and hurts students, so it’s never a decision that would be taken lightly, and that’s why they’re rare,” Mockabee said.
The right to strike is one of the few pieces of leverage a union has, he said.
“Oftentimes, the reason the faculty go on strike is because their administrations are not coming to the negotiating table to settle the contract,” Kilpatrick said. “We need to make sure that we’re addressing the root problems of what leads to strikes, instead of taking away what is a fundamental human right, which is, a fundamental human right to withhold your labor if you’re not being treated fairly.”
Retrenchment
S.B. 1 has a retrenchment provision that would block unions from negotiating on tenure.
Retrenchment essentially refers to layoffs and it typically happens when there is a reduction in an academic program. Each higher education institution already has their own retrenchment policies, Kilpatrick said.
“The reason that we find S.B. 1 problematic when it comes to retrenchment is because the definition is so broad that you can use virtually any reason to invoke retrenchment, and therefore to start closing academic programs and laying off faculty,” she said. “You can infer that having one student less in a program would be justification to invoke retrenchment.”
Retrenchment should only be used if absolutely necessary, Kilpatrick said.
“We want to make sure that we have a broad spectrum of academic programs, and that we’re not unnecessarily laying off faculty,” she said. “It means that students won’t necessarily be able to count on their programs being there, on their faculty being there, and I don’t think that we want to have that level of chaos occurring at our institutions.”
Post-tenure review
S.B 1 includes a post-tenure review policy, but Kilpatrick said the idea that tenured faculty are never reviewed or can’t be terminated is false.
Mockabee, who has been at UC for 23 years, said he has had annual performance reviews before and after making tenure.
“The principle of wanting every employee to be reviewed is fine, and there are ways that you could get there that would not impose this one-size-fits-all flawed process,” Mockabee said.
