COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – With two weeks until the deadline, Ohio’s budget is bursting at the seams – not with money, but with changes to the state’s public colleges and universities.
Approved along party lines Thursday afternoon, the Senate’s version of the biennial budget folded in hundreds of pages of policy affecting higher education. Some policies, including bans on faculty strikes and the mandatory development of “intellectual diversity centers” at two universities, are familiar, plucked from proposed legislation. Others, like stripping the voting rights from Ohio State University’s student trustees, are entirely new.
The additions aren’t a shock for the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors, said its executive director, Sara Kilpatrick.
“This is not a surprise, but it is incredibly disappointing that they’re putting an enormous policy change into a state appropriations bill,” Kilpatrick said.
A ‘slightly modified’ SB83 and intellectual diversity centers
The Ohio AAUP was expecting certain legislation – namely, Senate Bills 83 and 117 – to find its way into the budget.
SB83, dubbed the “Higher Education Enhancement Act,” implements a slew of mandates for public colleges and universities: It prohibits mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion training; bars universities from endorsing or opposing “controversial beliefs,” “specified concepts,” or “specified ideologies;” prevents university employees from striking; and limits relationships with Chinese research institutions.
Its sponsor, Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), repeated the same refrain on Thursday he’s offered many times in defense of the bill: It’s a desperately needed course-correction for Ohio’s colleges and universities that have prioritized diversity and inclusion over intellectual diversity and freedom of expression.
“It enhances free speech. Don’t believe anything anyone says about this bill,” Cirino said. “It provides greater academic freedom.”
Other Republican lawmakers, including Sen. Kristina Roegner (Hudson), repeated Cirino’s defense of the legislation as necessary to uplift opinions public universities have marginalized.
The bill has faced significant criticism from students, faculty and staff across many of Ohio’s universities – culminating in a record-breaking number of opponent testimony submitted against the legislation. Its most controversial aspects remain, including a prohibition on faculty strikes during collective bargaining disputes, instead requiring faculty to submit those disputes to a mediation process. It also blocks all donations and gifts from China, except for alumni donations.
Kilpatrick thumbed through her notes on the differences between the version of SB83 passed by the Senate and the one included in the budget – differences she was still trying to discern, so she could inform AAUP members as quickly as possible. Most of them are slight, but to Kilpatrick, they point to the quick pace lawmakers moved to include the bill in the budget.
“I think the reason that that’s significant is that it is an implicit admission that this bill was not ready to be voted out of the Senate when it was,” Kilpatrick said.
Those changes include reducing the impact of student evaluations on faculty’s overhaul performance evaluations – which are also prescribed by the bill – from 50% to at least 25%. Faculty are also allowed to appeal their annual performance evaluations, something prohibited in the version of SB83 passed by the Senate. Versions of the bill originally reduced university board of trustees’ terms from nine to four years, while the Senate budget establishes six-year term limits.
Also included in the budget is SB117, which requires Ohio State and the University of Toledo to develop intellectual diversity centers at their respective institutions. Ohio State’s center would focus on research in the “historical ideas, traditions, and texts that have shaped the American constitutional order and society,” while Toledo’s center would “form future leaders of the legal profession through research, scholarship, teaching, collaboration and mentorship.”
“It’s sad that we have to do this,” Roegner said. “I mean honestly, any college and university should be a place where there’s academic freedom and free speech. But that being said, I’m delighted that we are doing this. I believe in short time, in short order, those two institutions will be oversubscribed.”
SB117 was voted out of committee in early June but has not received floor debate. Since being sent to the House, SB83 has received one committee hearing, in late May.
Sen. William DeMora (D-Columbus) echoed Kilpatrick’s concern on the Senate floor Thursday, calling the addition of higher education policies and other legislation a “bad faith” attempt at passing the budget.
“The end goal for both of these bills is purportedly to try to increase free speech by mandating the teaching of certain kinds of speech, which is idiotic enough, but the real reason that these bills are in the budget is, again, the House wasn’t going to pass these things – they were stuck in committee,” DeMora said.
Walking back on a generational fight for student trustees
Only two students in the state have voting power on their university’s board of trustees – the undergraduate and graduate trustees at Ohio State. Ohio State’s student trustees were granted the right in 2015 under a provision of the state budget, a provision put forth as a compromise on a bill that would have required all public universities to grant their student trustees such abilities.
Eight years later, the Senate seeks to strip that power, as well as the power of student trustees to attend board executive sessions.
“It is disappointing across the board what the Senate is proposing to do to higher education,” said Michael Stinziano, who introduced the student trustee legislation three times while a state representative.
Currently Franklin County Auditor, Stinziano said he picked up the torch lit by his father, Mike Stinziano, when he was a state representative.
“He was the one responsible to get students on trustees at universities,” Stinziano said.
Stinziano’s father spearheaded the effort to get student representation on university’s boards, leading to the establishment of student trustees in 1988. DeMora said on the Senate floor he was an Ohio State student in the ‘80s during the push for student trustees, a fight he said the Senate has suddenly decided to quash, decades after being won.
“If [SB83] wasn’t enough of sticking the middle finger to students, this body decided that it’s going to take a clear stand against the autonomy of college students at my alma mater,” DeMora said.
An Ohio State spokesperson reaffirmed the university’s opposition to SB83 while promising to “continue to work with the General Assembly” on legislation regarding higher education.
“The graduate and student trustees’ perspectives are invaluable to the board’s decisions,” the spokesperson said in an email.
The budget has been sent to a dual-chamber Conference Committee, where lawmakers will meet behind closed doors to finalize the bill by midnight June 30.