A Time for Leadership

We have an extraordinary opportunity right now to help secure a great future for our children and untold generations of Ohioans to come. 

It is right in our hands. All we have to do is turn the key.

Passage of Senate Bill 83 is the surest way we have to keep the promise of the American Dream alive in Ohio. Numerous education experts have testified that it is one of the best higher education reform bills in the nation. I urge the House to support higher education and pass this bill now.

There is no longer a debate. Reforming higher education to restore free speech is no longer a partisan issue. Even the left is now seeing the wisdom in this. The culture on campus must change – trustees must direct university presidents to restore academic integrity and create intellectual diversity among their faculty.
 
The shocking protests on our campuses after recent barbaric events abroad became a major light bulb moment for liberals, stunned to find such virulent and knee-jerk antisemitism in their ranks. Even prominent Democrats have come to see the urgent need to restore free speech and intellectual diversity at our nation’s universities.

Former New York Mayor and Democratic candidate for president Michael Bloomberg wrote an editorial in the Wall Street Journal last week titled, Hamas’s Barbarity Heightens the Crisis in Higher Education: Jewish students bear the brunt of colleges’ culture of intolerance, conformity and ‘safe spaces.’

Bloomberg said watching “students at elite colleges implicitly or explicitly endorse Hamas’s attack” is a shameful “wake-up call about a crisis in higher education.”

He blamed college presidents who “have allowed their campuses to become bastions of intolerance, by permitting students to shout down the voices of others. They have condoned ‘trigger warnings’ that shield students from difficult ideas. They have refused to defend faculty who run afoul of student sentiment. And they have created ‘safe spaces’ that discourage or exclude opposing views.”

Bloomberg warned in a 2014 commencement speech at Harvard that “many of America’s top colleges had become Soviet-like in their lack of viewpoint diversity.” He says this combination of campus conformity and intolerance has only gotten worse.

“It is no surprise that support for terrorism, dressed in the language of social justice, has emerged from this environment,” he added. “The road to tyranny and genocide lies in refusing to countenance a challenge to one’s definition of justice and pursuit of it. That is precisely the culture universities have been coddling if not cultivating, and they are now reaping what they have sown.”

Bloomberg observed, “When students haven’t been taught to engage in constructive argument and debate, they default to slogans and slurs.” 

And that is how we have ended up with “schools that issue trigger warnings for classic novels (but) allow groups to scream for intifada.”

Three of the former mayor’s key recommendations are mirrored in SB 83, as it relates to Ohio’s public universities: 

 1.    “Presidents and deans should make a priority of hiring faculty with greater viewpoint diversity to teach students how to engage in civil discourse, while challenging and expanding their minds. Professors may resist, but administrators must make clear that such diversity is a requirement of academic freedom.”

2.    “Trustees have a crucial role to play in holding presidents accountable for this work. Running a school and managing professors is difficult and complex, as administrators well know, but organizational complexity can’t be an excuse for faculty conformity.”

3.    “College presidents should adopt the policy the University of Chicago has stuck to since 1967, when it declared: ‘The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.’”

Bloomberg concluded, “The bigotry infecting campuses will spread until college presidents directly address its causes and their own role in fostering them.”

He is not alone among elite opinion shapers. Former New York Times editorial writer and editor Bari Weiss wrote a piece titled simply, End  DEI.

Weiss aptly described the problem with putting the theory of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion into practice on campus: 

“What I saw was a worldview that replaced basic ideas of good and evil with a new rubric: the powerless (good) and the powerful (bad). It replaced lots of things. Color blindness with race obsession. Ideas with identity. Debate with denunciation. Persuasion with public shaming. The rule of law with the fury of the mob.”

Then she saw an even greater problem:

“It started with the universities. Then it moved on to cultural institutions—including some I knew well, like The New York Times—as well as every major museum, philanthropy, and media company. Then on to our medical schools and our law schools. It’s taken root at nearly every major corporation. It’s inside our high schools and even our elementary schools. The takeover is so comprehensive that it’s now almost hard to notice it—because it is everywhere.”

Weis concluded, “It’s not about diversity, equity, or inclusion. It is about arrogating power to a movement that threatens not just Jews—but America itself.”

The revulsion with DEI’s rampant antisemitism on campus (documented by OTR here and here) and in the streets has seeped into pop culture. 

Leftist comedian Sarah Silverman posted a blistering condemnation of the Democratic Socialists of America promotion of a pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square:

“Over 1000 slaughtered as of now. Girls raped over the bodies of their friends. These are kids, babies, children, teens, elderly, many of whom like my family march in the streets nightly protesting Netanyahu and the occupation THAT’S WHO HAMAS MURDERED you F**S.”

Those comments were echoed by David Greenfield, a former city councilman and prominent Orthodox Jewish Democrat, who said, “If you don’t condemn the D.S.A. ‘rally’ that took place today with swastikas, ‘intifada’ signs and chants of ‘river to the sea’ then we KNOW you hate Jews too.”  

It has all been too much even for leftist firebrand and comedian Michael Rapaport who “admitted that voting for former President Trump in 2024 is ‘on the table’ for him unless the Biden administration can get the current rash of antisemitism across the country under control.”

The enormity of this change of heart is hard to describe. Rappaport is described as “well known for his explicit anti-Trump epithets on social media.” But the blatant and hateful antisemitism on the left has so stunned Rappaport that he has lashed out at his former comrades with a string of vile obscenities.  

The issue has deeply divided the left, now exhibiting a hateful and acrimonious dialogue we don’t want to see on Ohio campuses. We need to appeal to our better natured Midwest angels by returning to and encouraging our traditional ability to disagree openly without being disagreeable.

We are already making good progress. SB 117, which I sponsored along with Senator Rob McColley and was rolled into this year’s budget, established academic centers at five of Ohio's public universities.

The legislation creates the Institute of American Constitutional Thought and Leadership within the University of Toledo’s College of Law to better prepare law students through civil discourse and rigorous inquiry, regardless of their philosophical viewpoint.

The legislation also creates the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at the Ohio State University, as well as similar civic engagement centers at Miami University, the University of Cincinnati, and Cleveland State University.

Ohio State and Toledo have already announced their academic councils, and the others are not far behind.

We can do even better. Much better. Passing SB 83 is a good place to start. I urge the House to pass this bill without delay. 

Lawmakers can secure a legacy of great progress for this state that will endure for ages.

Jerry Cirino represents Ohio Senate District 18
@SenatorCirino
www.ohiosenate.gov/cirino