More Thoughts Inspired by Senate Bill 83
Recently I published an op-ed in the Columbus Dispatch concerning Senate Bill 83. Not unexpectedly, it provoked a number of responses. I thought some of them were interesting enough to present in one place, and to respond to them in a slightly more public way.
One response asserted that the draconian cost cutting moves that the unfettered retrenchment language of SB 83 would allow are just a normal part of doing business in the private sector, and universities should work the same way. The layoffs, factory closings and other sharp cost-cutting measures that happen in private industry look to me like failure, and we should try to avoid them at our universities. Retrenchment is the nuclear bomb of reorganization, and is a sign of administrative failure. At BGSU there are myriad and ongoing processes for making sure our degree and course offerings match student and employer needs. I’m sure the same is true at other universities. While we are not for-profit entities, we are keenly aware of what potential students and their families need from us, and are constantly making sure we are offering it.
Also, there is no way a for profit entity could offer what BGSU does for the cost. We allow access to higher education and a better life for tens of thousands of young people precisely because we are not expected to make a profit. The much appreciated but still too small subsidy we receive from the state of Ohio helps keep the cost lower than it otherwise would be, but we are profoundly tuition dependent. Our slogan, “A Public University for the Public Good,” is exactly descriptive of the fact that not just the students who directly earn an education from BGSU benefit from it. We all benefit from having a well educated citizenry and a talented workforce.
I also respectfully disagree with the dichotomy sometimes presented between the “real world” and the world of universities. We are very much in the real world. The world of ideas and preparing students for rewarding careers is very much a part of the real world. At places like BGSU, the myth of the ivory tower is just that, a myth.
Supporters of SB 83 also profoundly misunderstand the nature of faculty life in 2023. One asserted that professors have never had to fear losing their jobs. I know of no such person. Adjunct/part-time faculty essentially lose their jobs every semester as universities decide whether to offer their courses during the next semester. Non-tenure eligible faculty (called Qualified Rank Faculty at BGSU and representing more than a third of the full-time faculty) regularly experience fear of losing their jobs, as part of an increasingly precarious workforce often described as “flexible.” Tenure eligible faculty lose their jobs if they fail to earn tenure, and at BGSU we have a process called extraordinary review whereby the ultimate outcome could be de-tenuring and termination. There are no faculty who do not fear losing their jobs. What would be so great about a workforce that constantly fears losing their jobs anyway?
And all faculty are frequently evaluated. Every year we are evaluated for the merit portion of our salary increase. If we wish to be promoted, we are rigorously evaluated by peers and administrators. In order to teach graduate courses we must maintain graduate faculty status, and we are evaluated in order to get and keep it. Then there is the extraordinary review mentioned above, as well as a process to evaluate the fitness for duty of professors who may be performing poorly for reasons outside their control. There is no shortage of evaluation of faculty of all ranks.
Then of course there is the issue of ideological indoctrination. It does not take a special professor not to sway their students politically. It simply takes a professional, which my colleagues are. I’ve never asked any of my colleagues what their ideology is, and I don’t think it’s necessary for a political science professor to believe in something to teach about it. In the first week of my American Political Thought class we covered Barack Obama’s Speech on Race and Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address. We took off from there through colonial times, the Founding, abolitionism and the Civil War, early women’s rights, the Transcendentalists, Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun, Andrew Carnegie and Thorstein Veblen…well, you get the point. We try to cover everything. And it does not matter if I believe in the authors we read. I can teach it without agreeing with it.
I’ll conclude this piece as I have concluded nearly all of the writing I’ve done about SB 83. State universities in Ohio face real problems, such as inadequate state funding and rising student debt. We should all get together and figure out how to make college more accessible for everyone in Ohio, rather than obsessing about the political beliefs of professors, destroying faculty unions, and making it easier for administrators to fire professors.
The opinions expressed are those of David J. Jackson, and not his employer.
