It is officially Senate Bill 1 but it may become Ohio’s mistake no 1. Passed recently by the State Legislature and signed by Gov Mike Dewine, the bill would do a number of things, some reasonable but most not, particularly the more important ones.

It grew out of(mostly, anyway)a dislike of DEI policies. Now I want to be clear on this. I have often criticized DEI myself. I came to dislike it because it had seemed to me to have done that thing well intentioned “liberal” groups often do(“Me Too,” for example). It had gone past just getting a fair break for all and getting rid of old prejudices in gender and sexual issues, immigration, ethnicity, etc. I agree with most of their early moves, but eventually DEI advocates came to be a pushy sounding minority which gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, of trying to take over or at least direct the Democratic agenda

DEI came to dominate at least the news coverage of liberal/Democratic thinking and intentions; it gave the impression that regular Democrats were in retreat and yielding to radical outsiders While no one seems quite certain what the Dems did wrong in the Presidential election last year, there is widespread agreement that it could have been run better. One thing was that an overemphasis on DEI distracted from the contrast in Dem and GOP economic ways and obscured what Trump had in mind(as I sit here in the library with the DJIA down a thousand points 2 days in a row, it is obvious what a chance we missed)

So I became disillusioned with DEI as both fanatic and suicidal. It would (and did, I would say)distract attention from Democratic advantages.. It is not that they were entirely wrong, but their wishes became too much at the forefront of the campaign and were often couched in terms which seemed to me almost calculated to drive away or keep away moderates who might have voted for Kamala or at least stayed neutral. Of course now, watching the markets collapse and friends abroad turn away, there’s not much to be done–for now. But I digress.

There were things wrong with DEI but there were(still are)good and bad ways of countering its excesses. OH chose mostly a bad one. Gov Dewine has been, I think, a fairly good governor in many ways. He led the state through the covid crisis with determination and effort and ranked almost equal with Andrew Cuomo of NY in his leadership among governors. He’s not quite as effective as a communicator, but obviously more honest.

He did have a tendency to toady up to Trump from time to time, but , hey, he’s a Republican governor–and his toadying always seemed forced and unenthusiastic. Late in his first term I was learning toward voting for him for a second term when the legislature passed a bill which made widespread availability of guns legal in OH. I decided that if he vetoed the bill (which I knew to be unlikely)I would send him $5.00 and become a Dewine supporter. He signed it and I stuck with the Dems.

I had very little hope he would veto Senate Bill 1, but I was in there hoping, And of course he signed it. So what does it do? Without, I hope, boring you with too much detail, here is a brief summation of it main points as summarized by USA Today–

“No training offices or scholarships based on (DEI)” Some of these programs are decades old, not the result of some recent radicalism. They were started to give access to college education to underrepresented groups. This seems to me to have been a proper use of government–to make things fair. Perhaps it was misused, but I think that was its intent. Perhaps now its issues cannot be used at all and many different groups will be disadvantaged, just as their grandparents were.

Faculty strikes will be banned. This one could be argued both ways, but I don’t think OH has been rife with unreasonable faculty strikes and I don’t see the need to deny teachers the right to try to improve their own lot. That will likely be the effect and may drive thousands of OH teachers to look elsewhere for work.

The power of tenure for college professors will be reduced. It will still be theoretically there but subject to being overridden by student surveys and colleagues’ opinions. No doubt tenure has been misused when professors could be let go only for “cause” and very little was “cause” enough. This will go the other way and make professors’ jobs subject to quick, possibly immature and ill-informed opinions of students and fellow teachers. Will they always be wrong? No, of course not–but there will be enough of a threat to drive OH college teachers to look elsewhere.

Higher education institutions will be forbidden the right to take positions on “controversial beliefs or policies,” that is such things as climate change, foreign policy, DEI, immigration, marriage and abortion.” While these issues may have been discussed on campus inadequately and unfairly in the past, that was perhaps better than not getting discussed at all. At least that seems the case to me and that is where this bill seems to point. This has not stopped some Republicans from trying to sell this as a freedom of expression bill.

–Eliminate undergraduate degrees if fewer than five students obtain degrees over three years. Now this sounds sensible in a way–it might eliminate spending money on a policy that benefits few. But would you place a bet on more traditional programs getting the axe as much as more recent and less popular ones?

–A ban on donations from and partnerships with the Chinese government–well, OK, I guess, but is it likely you would otherwise have a Chinese professor teaching a Political Science course at Bowling Green?

–Faculty syllabi would be required to be posted on line. It seems to me that we were already moving that direction at Kent State when the covid got rid of many people, me included. It may be a good idea, but what is it doing in this bill?–

A reduction in the tenure of of university trustees, political appointees who oversee universities, from nine to six years. Well, OK– sounds a good idea. Possibly they tossed it in here to give the whole thing a feeling of normality and sense. But it is of course, as is the syllabi posting thing, a very small matter when compared to the huge negative results of Senate Bill 1 and maybe calculated to give a misleading sense of balance to the bill.

Many liberal groups are maintaining that they will challenge this law in the courts and I believe many of them should. No doubt some of them will go too far for my taste and opinions. but I think it needs to be done anyway. Freda Levenson of the ACLU has already been quoted as saying very directly “This legislation is unconstitutional and cannot stand.”

For that piece of defiance, and really for this whole blog, we have USA Today to thank. The article reached me at the insistence of my wife, Joyce, who had read it in the pages of the local USA Today outlet, the once -proud Akron “Beacon Journal” which appears to have lost its independence and maybe more.