In my years of teaching, I have occasionally had students with conservative views, and that’s fine. They’re a minority, but tolerance is one of the default principles of liberal arts education, so they get to express their position, everyone else shares their ideas, we all learn.
The problem isn’t conservatism, it’s authoritarianism. We are living in a country with a rising authoritarian minority that wants to shut everyone else down, and that is a problem. And that’s why Ohio is a problem — authoritarians want to dictate the content of a college education.
Ohio universities’ new centers to combat “liberal bias” aren’t popular with students, so a Republican leader wants to require attendance.
Bringing in America’s 250th anniversary, the Republican supermajority in Ohio’s legislature wants to expand civics education at colleges and universities. That hasn’t been getting the warmest of welcomes on campuses.
This puckered prune of a beancounter doesn’t like free speech
So this Republican, Jerry Cirino, has passed a new law.
S.B. 1 focuses on what Cirino calls “free speech,” banning public universities in Ohio from Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives, having “bias” in the classroom and limiting how “controversial topics” can and can’t be taught. “Controversial” under Ohio law includes “belief policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
I appreciate how the report mentions that Cirino is a “free speech” advocate, and the next word is “banning”. It goes on to say that he opposes “controversial” ideas, in which he gets to categorize what ideas are to be policed. “Climate policies”? Climate change is real and has serious consequences (witness the heat wave we’re experiencing now), but Cirino wants to control discussion of what to do about it.
“electoral politics, foreign policy”…do Ohio universities lack political science and history departments?
I know Republicans hate DEI, but Ohio is a diverse state, and universities tend to hire from an international pool of academic candidates.
Ohioans can’t even discuss immigration policy? Are we just supposed to accept a conservative white man’s opinions without recourse to evidence, or the consequences, or the literature?
The primary consumers of college education are 18-22 year olds. Lord forbid that marriage and abortion be a topic of interest and concern among that group.
Jerry Cirino is a retired medical device company executive. Don’t assume that he therefore has experience in medicine or engineering, though — he has a BS in business and an MBA, and has completely foregone the kind of breadth of knowledge a typical liberal arts graduate gets, and instead has been narrowly focused on making money.
Yet he thinks he has the qualifications to overhaul higher education in Ohio? Jesus. This really is the age when incompetence rules.
You can’t run a government the same way you run a business. All the people that vote for business moguls think that because they make a lot of money they know how to run a gov’t. That’s a non sequitur. Politicians need to know how to use money, not make money. See the whole DOGE disaster as one example of how running a gov’t like a business doesn’t work.
What makes something the subject of political controversy? When someone decides to make it the subject of political controversy. Take vaccines as an example. Is there any reason that politics should be involved in an aspect of medical care which is backed by much scientific evidence? No! But some people believe that it is controversial, and some of those people got themselves into political power, ergo it is politically controversial.
And of course, I think someone should be using these new centers to combat “liberal bias” to promote Flat-Earthism, my favorite well-poisoning example. Imagine Ohio students being required to attend a course on Flat-Earthism.
I’m glad you exposed the glaring irony if not outright contradiction in following a claim to be in favor free speech there is a whole list of topics that should not be discussed freely, But then we are discussing he incompetence of business people turned politicians of which the prime examples are Trump and Musk followed by lesser examples like Linda McMahon.
The problem is that businesses, particularly private ones, are run like autocracies, They don’t want and positively discourage worker participation such as unions, Democracies are messy and argumentative. Much quicker and more efficient for the boss to call the shots, Musk used to crow about instantly firing people who had the temerity to disagree with him, We’re seeing the same thing happen all over our government. You either tow the MAGA line or you’re out. Laws and court orders? Just ignore them, Legal precedents? Just get a compliant conservative Supreme Court to overturn them. Settled law, my ass!
It kind of freaks me out that one of the banned topics is “marriage”, to be honest. Not just same-sex marriage but all marriage. Why do I get the feeling The Powers That Be are trying to define marriage as some patriarchal religious crap? Me and my atheist egalitarian marriage are feeling a bit threatened.
PZ keeps finding more crapitallist corporate attacks on education, because they are so frequent. As many here point out education is NOT a business, just like the USPS is NOT a business, etc.
We need to get the crapitallists corporate aholes out of education and government! While we are at it we need to get the xtian terrorists like prager, etc. out of education and government!, too!
Here is another example of the problem:
Scholasticide is defined by the UN as the obliteration of a society’s institutions of learning through the destruction of education
<https://www.juancole.com/2026/07/confronting-historical-association.html
The article talks about how ‘The American Historical Association (AHA) was founded in 1884, a time of continuing dispossession, displacement, and assault on Indigenous peoples. . . the early AHA was often complicit in such exclusionary practices,’
@4 cendare mentioned ‘my atheist egalitarian marriage’
I reply: that is a great way to characterize a marriage. I, my spouse and our friends think of marriage as a ‘mutually beneficial partnership’.
I was trying to think of other examples from history where a society has attacked and destroyed education to further the agenda of the ruling class.
I’m sure there are many.
.1. The Khmer Rouge destroyed Cambodian universities and also tried to destroy Cambodian culture.
.2. The Afghanistan Taliban did it once and is trying again to destroy Afghanistan’s education system and culture.
.3. The commies of the old Soviet Union destroyed parts of their science sector, notably genetics, with disastrous results to their ability to feed their people.
.4. The Nazis attacked the parts of science and education that contradicted their bigoted fantasies, such as Jewish science, which was actually advanced physics.
So Trump, the GOP, and Ohio have something in common with the Khmer Rouge, Afghanistan Taliban, the USSR, and the Nazis.
I wouldn’t call this a point in their favor but I’m sure they would.
One other thing about attacking knowledge and education stands out.
All of those authoritarian dictatorships ultimately failed.
It’s almost seems like knowledge, education, and science are necessary for a healthy society that is progressing into the future rather than heading back to the Dark Ages.
@7 raven talked about all the historical attacks on eduction.
I reply: what always comes to mind is the burning of the library at alexandria. It’s cause seems to still be unsettled. But, its burning is a tremendous loss. The daughter library’ in the Serapeum was likely burned by xtian terrorists.
redwood @1:
Actually, you can’t even really run a business the way today’s MBAs are running businesses. They don’t know anything about how their businesses work, so a lot of these businesses only keep running because of the human and financial and organizational capital that was already there when these Enron types took over. By the time the business runs into the ground, the MBAs have gone on to the next company or reorg or merger or spin-off, so it’s not so obvious that it’s their mismanagement that broke things.
That’s what happened to Boeing, too.
A professor I knew who used to work for the Canadian Space Agency had a long and well-practiced rant about how the entire concept of the ‘MBA’ was basically the result of businesses during WWII having to hire people trained specifically for the business paperwork required to handle government/military contracts (since none of the people already working had knowledge of that, and just handling all that was pretty much a full time job in itself), and then letting that sort of ‘all businesses have the same paperwork, we don’t need to care what the business actually does‘ idea metastasize.
Many years ago I heard it said that businesses have three stages of life: childhood, when they’re run by entrepreneurs (flashy new ideas but a high early mortality rate); adulthood, when they’re run by businessmen (general stability and slower progress); and senility, when they’re run by accountants (no new ideas, just a decline caused by not wanting to invest in anything new). By that standard, MBAs like to think they’re businessmen but a lot of them are actually engaging in a speed-run to the accountants stage, because that’s where they can eat all the short-term profits and leave the decaying corpse for the scavengers later.
Boeing is the perfect example. Somehow the MBA’s ran McDonnell Douglas into the ground and got bought up by Boeing. Yet somehow those same MBA’s ended up running Boeing. How does that even happen in a rational world?