Instead of broadly reaching out to stakeholders, Sen. Cirino brought into a proponent hearing five retired professors, with the average age close to 75 to talk about current issues facing undergraduates. Even with their sterling right-wing credentials, the group’s comments could hardly have been more irrelevant to real issues, much like Cirino’s bill. Not a single student or recent graduate testified in favor of the bill.
In some ways, the bill and even Cirino’s defense is just an opportunity to degrade professors who have spent their careers building their expertise through their education and research. But – expertise – who needs it? So, Sen. Cirino spent much space in his op-ed criticizing faculty who have criticized his bill, using the term “woke” and thus tipping his hand that this is not about enhancing higher education, but about scoring political points in the culture wars.
In his defense, he provided this astounding statement: “Conservatives are political minorities on woke campuses. They are treated unequally and can face punishing censorship. Just like racial discrimination, this is unfair and irrational. It robs students of their equal rights. A uniformly leftist agenda on campus also replaces education with politically correct indoctrination.”
Because of his lack of familiarity with our faculty, I don’t believe he can speak to either their “wokeness” or whether conservatives are being treated unfairly. It is true that many conservative ideas are unpopular with young people, but that is not the fault of the faculty. And comparing racial discrimination to a disagreement about ideas as though they are the same thing is astoundingly tone deaf. Anyone who thinks there is a “uniformly leftist agenda on campus” has never been to a campus or to a faculty meeting.
There is much about Sen. Cirino’s statements and his legislation that is very Orwellian. In his classic book, 1984, George Orwell wrote about how the dominant party sought to impose its will on society: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
It is dangerous for a political party to seek to control higher education. Across time and across the world, one-party states have always attacked the independence of their universities and their faculty. And now the moment has come to Ohio.
It is time for Sen. Cirino and his party to stop this attempt to subvert Ohio colleges and universities. They belong to the people and are too important to be transformed into tools of right-wing ideologues.
John McNay, PhD, is Professor of History at University of Cincinnati.
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