Bill must be defeated to save higher education in Ohio
“Good” faculty should have nothing to worry about, Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-kirtland, the author of Senate Bill 83 promises.
If professors are concerned, he adds, it’s likely because “they’re not good at what they do.”
Bill would cut the ground from under teachers
As teachers read through this misguided projectile headed at higher ed institutions, many of us have the same thoughts about the senator.
What is evident in this bill is that its supporters either don’t know or don’t care about what actually happens in our college and university classrooms. Indeed, this bill seems explicitly designed to further cut the ground from under teachers already facing innumerable challenges as they try to create spaces where actual learning can happen.
Intellectual diversity in jeopardy
The purpose of Senate Bill 83 is “quite simple,” Cirino argues. “It ensures free expression on campus and in the classroom at Ohio’s public universities and colleges.”
Yet, as good teachers can attest, nothing is ever that simple.
Intellectual diversity sits at the heart of SB-83. Once passed, the legislation would “establish and implement intellectual diversity rubrics for course approval, approval of courses to satisfy general education requirements, student course evaluations, common reading programs, annual reviews, strategic goals for each department, and student learning outcomes.”
For faculty who are already weighed down with constant demands to construct and grade rubrics, jump through accreditation hoops, and satisfy administrators, what we see is yet more time being siphoned from instruction to bureaucracy.
But the real issue goes far beyond bean-counting and indicates that in their attempts to fall in line with other Republican-dominated states, our lawmakers are willing to sacrifice our students’ education on the altar of their ideology.
How, we ask, is intellectual “diversity” to be determined? Who is doing the determining?
Is the economics professor violating “intellectual diversity” rules if she doesn’t include Marx along with Adam Smith in her introductory course?
After my history students have read Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” along with other required texts, shouldn’t I add Angela Davis to the syllabus, for King alone hardly represents the diversity of Black thinkers.
“Intellectual diversity,” I would remind our legislators, does not come in just two flavors, “liberal” and “conservative.”
And if we can’t define (or contain) what “diversity” is, how do we to know we have achieved it? This, too, is “simple”: The legislation requires that we “guarantee” that students have “reach[ed] their own conclusions about controversial matters.” But how, exactly, do we do this? Do I require that students in my higher ed seminar submit to an FMRI so I can see how they really came to their conclusions?
All Ohio’s legislators have spent years in classrooms as students, if not teachers. They know that teachers will lose students to boredom if they are not continually engaging them, influencing them, prodding them to think deeply about the subject matter.
We don’t give them answers, but the means of getting at answers. A smart writer once observed that to get people to build a boat, you don’t give a blueprint. You make them long for the edge of the sea.
That’s what we do, but how are we expected to do this if we worry that two students will get their comeuppance by telling state inquisitors that we have “influenced” their conclusions.
How do we engage our students when, at any moment, we worry that some guy who accessed our syllabus online and didn’t like what he saw bursts into our classroom with an AR-15?
This bill doesn’t support “intellectual diversity,” inquiry, curiosity or debate, and it must be defeated if we want to save higher education in Ohio.
Steven Volk is emeritus professor of history at Oberlin College. In 2011 he was named U.S. College Professor of the Year.