Ohio Capital Journal

After refusing to make any comment on SB83 and later SB1 he finally did make a vague statement on the bill. As Signal Akron reported:

In a LinkedIn post after the bill passed the Senate, he said state lawmakers 'have once again demonstrated Ohio’s willingness to take the lead to tackle tough issues and solve hard problems,' though the post didn’t explicitly identify what he believed those issues or problems were.¹
While he did not specify what those problems were, on a May 1st [podcast]² with Bertram DeSouza, he admitted that he didn't believe any indoctrination (one of the central justifications behind SB1) was occurring at YSU.

Watch video here

After playing coy about his thoughts on SB1, twenty days later the Belief in Life and Liberty Political Action Committee (BILL's PAC) donated money to four legislators who supported SB1:

The details of these and other contributions can be found in the [Vindicator story]³ that came out last week.

If you are not already angry, outraged, (choose your adjective), you should be. Let me point out a few things:

1. President Johnson refused to discuss SB1 as it made its way through the legislature, even though it would directly impact YSU, its faculty, and its students.
2. As I mentioned, President Johnson publicly stated that he did not believe faculty were indoctrinating, nor were they failing to present "both sides" of an issue. Yet, he still supported a bill that represents censorship and state overreach into our classrooms.
3. The contribution to Sen. Cirino is particularly offensive as Cirino regularly slandered faculty by accusing them of indoctrination and bias while also "intuitively" knowing we gave extra credit to students for protesting—statements that are also insulting to our students.
4. After the passage of the bill, Johnson extolled its protection of free speech while ignoring its impact on scholarships for women and minorities.

As far as I know, a university president running a PAC is not illegal in Ohio. Ethically, I think President Johnson is walking a more precarious line. At best there is the appearance of impropriety, at worst it is a conflict of interest.

Since this is not a contract issue, I believe our response should come from the Academic Senate. We need to demand from our administration that issues affecting YSU are publicly discussed and debated. The president cannot refuse to discuss legislation that will have a substantive impact on the university and then turn around and use PAC money to influence its outcome.

Update: YSU President Bill Johnson, through his PAC, has also contributed $6,000 to gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign. Ramaswamy has publicly stated his desire to close and/or consolidate universities and programs. Of course to remain impartial, he also contributed $250 to the Acton campaign.

In a recent press conference, Senator Cirino bragged about the success of SB1. The bill to eliminate the "wokeness" an "indoctrination" occurring at Ohio's institutions of higher education has—according to Cirino—had none of the negative impacts claimed by its opponents. To hold this position requires a Herculean taks of self-deception. SB1 has had a negative impact on the students who depended on the resources found in the women's, African American, and LGBTQ+ centers that were forced to close down due to this bill. Similarly, the chilling effect of this bill has been felt on my campus as well as others. Many professors have chosen to avoid important topics that might be deemed controversial or lead to a complaint that the topic makes the student feel "uncomfortable".

While there has not been enough time to measure all the consequences of SB1, one question Cirino and the other backers of SB1 have not asked is how many professors would leave their current position in Ohio if they were offered a position elsewhere. It is also too soon to know how many new PhDs have chosen not to apply to jobs in Ohio because of the elimination of all meaningful protections of tenure and the restrictive classroom climate.

Of course, it is easy to claim success solving a problem that never really existed. Before introducing SB1, Cirino never provided any evidence that the conservative views of faculty or of students were being suppressed. In fact, as I have previously noted, Republicans have had complete control of university boards of trustees, as well as university presidents and provosts. If there was indoctrination or censorship, then it occurred under the watchful eye of these same appointees.

The Real Centers of Indoctrination

If you are really looking for indoctrination at Ohio's public colleges and universities, then you only have to look to the civic centers established in 2023 to combat "liberal bias". These "intellectual diversity centers" hosted by Cleveland State, Miami of Ohio, The Ohio State, University of Toledo, and Wright State are designed to ensure that conservative viewpoints are provided with their own safe space.

Just to be clear, I am not exaggerating about these being protected spaces. The centers have been specifically designed to circumvent normal hiring processes. Faculty who are hired need not be vetted by colleagues in their discipline. They can be hired, fired, tenured, or promoted at the discretion of the center director.

Strangely, these centers (by their very design) seem to violate SB1's ban on ideological hiring which:

Prohibit[s] political and ideological litmus tests in all hiring, promotion, and admissions decisions, including diversity statements and any other requirement that applicants describe their commitment to any ideology, principle, concept, or formulation that requires commitment to any controversial belief or policy.

Yet, these centers recruit and hire faculty precisely because of their ideological bent. According to Senator Cirino, their purpose is to combat the liberal bias on campuses, and to "change people's minds and hearts".

It seems that combatting liberal bias on only five campuses is not enough for Senator Cirino. He needs to make sure all Ohio students receive a state-sponsored civics education. To achieve this goal, he has introduced a new bill, SB461 that places sole control of the content of all civics courses with the Ohio civics board—which just happens to be composed of the conservative civic centers directors:

(1) The Ohio civics board has sole and exclusive authority over all aspects of American civic literacy courses established under this section, including course modality, syllabi, class size, faculty teachers, and course content.

(2) American civic literacy literacy courses courses offered offered by by a a state state institution are subject to the approval of the board. The board may adopt standard, uniform, or model American civic literacy or American civic literacy courses for use, exclusive or otherwise, in the board's judgment, in state institutions.

The civic centers, SB1, and the now proposed SB461 are all about imposing a conservative point of view that circumvents the diverse, nuanced, and often unsettling views of our history and institutions in favor of a sanitized story. This does a disservice to our students and wastes the expertise of our faculty.

Creating unaccountable academically conservative centers and granting them control over the content of university civics courses is not just state overreach, it is the definition of indoctrination.