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(upbeat music) (Glenn rings a bell on the table) - It's about the authority.

Hello, and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that helped democracy thrive.

It is Friday, May 12th.

I'm Glenn Forbes, supervising producer with Ideastream Public Media, and I'm the moderator for today's important panel conversation on Senate Bill 83, SB 83 for short.

The Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, if passed, the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act would lead to sweeping changes for the state's public universities and colleges.

While SB 83 mainly applies to public institutions, it could also affect private colleges and universities that do receive state dollars.

The bill was introduced last month by Senator Jerry Cirino, and as we'll learn in a minute, there were some additional changes to the bill on Tuesday of this week.

Now, supporters believe the bill will strengthen First Amendment rights and reshape Ohio's higher education system to meet the needs of the 21st century.

Critics accuse the bill of trying to micromanage colleges and universities on a variety of issues, and exploit culture wars.

Today we're joined by four panelists, two in support, and two in opposition of SB 83.

In opposition, we have Ohio Senate Democratic Leader, Nickie J. Antonio.

Also Dr. Deborah Smith, president of the Kent State Chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

She's also professor of philosophy at Kent State University.

In support of SB 83, we have George Dent, Professor Emeritus of Law at Case Western Reserve University, and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars and president of its state affiliate, the Ohio Association of Scholars.

Also in support, Greg R. Lawson, research fellow at The Buckeye Institute.

Now, it is worth noting that the City Club did reach out to Senator Jerry Cirino to join the panel as the bill's sponsor, he declined to join the conversation both in-person and virtually.

We do have some recent quotes from Senator Cirino, and an op-ed he wrote in "The Columbus Dispatch," for his thoughts on it.

If you have a question for our panelists, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet your question @thecityclub.

City Club staff will try to work it into the second half of our program.

Members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Leader Antonio, George Dent, Greg Lawson, and Dr. Deborah Smith.

(audience claps) We of course want to give ample time to our four panelists, but I just want to give a quick overview of some of the changes that have been reported in the bill, and then we'll certainly get to the thoughts of our panelists.

The bill would now allow mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training at universities only when related to accreditation.

Universities would have to apply for each exemption.

Also, licensing and grants would be a situation where they could institute this mandatory training.

It also clarifies that the ban on financial partnerships with China does not include tuition from Chinese students, and existing programs with China would be allowed to continue.

It also says now no topics are banned, but faculty must allow intellectual diversity to be expressed.

Leader Antonio, let's start with you.

Your impression of those changes, and where we go from here with this bill.

- Well, first of all, I wanna thank the City Club for this opportunity to have this important discussion, which sometimes legislation flies under the radar and then everyone is surprised when it passes.

So I appreciate the conversation, and shedding some light onto this important and dangerous bill, frankly.

With the changes came actually taking a bad bill and making it worse.

One of the changes that you've just outlined that says that now if they have to for accreditation, a university or college.

And by the way, my understanding also is this now, in the sub-bill, only applies to public universities and colleges.

They have taken the privates out of it.

They are exempt now from all of this.

So the one change that you mentioned that says you have to get permission if it's an accreditation risk for your university, to lose if you don't mandate DEI programming.

They have to go and be supplicants to the chancellor, get the permission of the chancellor before they can do this, and every single organization, and they have to provide the reasons why.

This sounds very undemocratic to me.

So that problem, I can go on about some of the other changes.

I don't know how much you want me to?

- [Glenn] We'll certainly get to those.

Obviously we can talk a little bit about how the sausage is made, if you will.

This bill, there have been some amendments up for debate.

Where does it go now?

- Well, again, I want you all to know, over 500 people submitted testimony against the bill, both in written form and in-person.

There were seven hours of testimony.

We have never seen anything like this for such a narrow bill before, at least since I've been there.

There were a number, as you said, of changes that happened.

People were asking for changes that would make a bad bill better.

Instead, these changes actually make the bill more draconian and worse.

- Let's go down the line here.

Professor Dent, you are in support of the bill.

Your impression of the changes, and why you are supportive of the bill?

- Well, the bill was designed to address a number of problems, so let me just mention three of them.

The first is intellectual uniformity in our universities, instead of being the marketplaces of ideas that they're supposed to be, they have become echo chambers, and many students complain that their courses are indoctrination camps.

So what this bill does is requires state universities to establish intellectual diversity as a principal, and to have a plan to pursue it and report on how they're doing.

Related to this is the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion training.

As Glenn Forbes said, it forbids mandatory training, it does not forbid volunteer.

If a student wants to elect to take a course, or a worker wants to elect to take a training, that's fine.

The other is the increasing use of DEI statements for applicants for jobs.

These have become ways of flushing out the political views of people who are applying for jobs.

And if you're not sufficiently woke, you don't get the job, the bill would ban the use of these statements.

A second is racial discrimination.

As you probably know from some cases pending before the Supreme Court right now, racial discrimination has become very common in our universities, especially against Asian Americans.

The bill would forbid racial discrimination in our universities.

A third is free speech.

Half or more of college students report that they are sometimes or often afraid to speak their minds.

And this bill would guarantee it would require universities to have free speech policies.

What sometimes happens today, is you saw recently, for example, at Stanford, is when a mob shouts to prevent a speaker from being heard, the dean says, "tisk, tisk," but does not do anything about it.

The bill would require our universities and colleges not only to have free speech policies, but to enforce them.

So those are three of the things that the bill is designed to address.

- Thank you.

Dr. Deborah Smith, you had mentioned to me earlier that the changes, some of them addressed your concerns and lessened them, but other changes to the bill kind of heightened your concerns.

Could you elaborate on that?

- Yeah, so first of all, one of the things that I think we have to be clear about is that although the bill styles itself as a free speech bill, it would actually explicitly censor the speech of our public universities and colleges.

In particular, my university, Kent State University, would be prohibited from opposing systematic racism, sexism, and discrimination based on LGBTQ status.

It would be prohibited from promoting and endorsing diversity, equity, inclusion, social justice, any sort of climate policy meant to address climate change, and wouldn't even be able to endorse such very general concepts as sustainability and allyship.

Those are explicitly excluded from things that the university as an institution can endorse or oppose in the bill.

I have had concern, and when I testified on April 19th, I focused on my concerns about how the bill would affect academic freedom in the classroom.

And on the one hand, I'm very pleased to see, and I thank Senator Cirino for including language in the substitute bill that makes it clear that it is not illegal for faculty to cover these topics in the classroom.

However, I think that the overarching provisions of the bill would still radically impact academic freedom.

And in particular, I'm concerned about the part of the bill that requires faculty to post the syllabi for each course that they teach.

So the syllabus is gonna have your contact information, a detailed description of what's covered in the class, the assigned readings and assignments.

It's designed to let the students know what's in the class, and what to expect from the class.

The bill requires faculty to have these syllabi posted on a publicly accessible, very prominent part of the website available to the general public without any sort of a login, or behind any sort of a wall.

And this provision would allow, and I fear, even invite individuals who don't want these topics covered in the classroom, to search through the syllabi, identify individual faculty who do cover these topics in their classes, and then engage in either direct harassment of the faculty individual, or threaten lawsuits against the individual and the institution.

And for that very reason it's, I think, still gonna put a real chill on academic free speech, or academic freedom, rather.

The one thing I do wanna say though, is that it's not quite the existential threat to academic freedom that the original version was.

And I now fear that the bill has become an existential threat to the right of faculty to collectively bargain the terms and conditions of their employment.

And I hope to have an opportunity to talk about that later.

- [Glenn] Yes, that's an important point that we will certainly get to later.

This idea that it would prohibit faculty from striking, we'll certainly get into that.

I want to bring in Greg Lawson from The Buckeye Institute.

Before we do that, I just wanna mention, in Senator Cirino's op-ed, he said this will not ban any classes.

And in terms of the climate change, climate policy, I believe is what it says in the bill now, basically what it says is, they are not required to take any position on controversial belief or policy.

So what Senator Cirino is saying, is that these faculty can talk about these issues in their classes, but they cannot take an official position, so to speak, on these classes.

Mr. Lawson?

- Sure.

Well, I think the first thing is, this bill is about academic freedom.

And I think that while I certainly understand some of the arguments that I've heard that is in the opposition, I simply don't think that they are really accurate in how it's going to play itself out.

Socrates said that "unexamined human life," or that "unexamined life is not worth living."

And I think that, that's something, from a philosophical standpoint, that's the cornerstone of Western philosophy, and one of the cornerstones of Western civilization.

And I think we all take that pretty seriously, and that means that we should be able to ask a lot of questions, be able to describe what are underlying assumptions that individuals have.

And be able to have a dialectical conversation amongst ourselves.

And I think that what Professor Dent raised is some real concerns, not just in Ohio, it's a national phenomenon, but it does happen in Ohio where there are opportunities where speakers who have potentially a view that doesn't necessarily comport with the general faculty and staff, or even some of the students, have actually been shouted down.

We've seen judges shouted down in other states.

We've also seen professors actually be penalized for not using a certain pronoun.

And in fact, the university in this case, this was an Ohio case, Shawnee State actually lost in court because it was violative of the First Amendment of this professor, and they actually ultimately agreed to pay several hundred thousand dollars to this individual.

So they lost in a court of law because the university essentially trampled on the First Amendment rights of this individual.

So when I hear people say that this stuff doesn't happen, I think it's patently untrue, it does happen.

And there's court cases that validate that, that is in fact happening.

What Senate Bill 83 is intending to do is not to stifle things.

And in fact, I think some of the things that have been done in the sub-bill have actually made some of these improvements, given opportunity, and it's not banning these discussions, it's not banning even these trainings on a voluntary basis.

And I might add, "Harvard Business Review" has done some work on the fact that mandatory DEI trainings are actually not helpful.

A number of thinkers who are very prominent in the space of looking at some of these diversity issues and implicit bias issues have made clear that mandatory trainings are problematic actually in many ways, because you may compel somebody to say something because that's what you're supposed to do, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're really changing somebody's mind.

In fact, you may actually, instead of having a voluntary conversation where we can have the hard conversations, conversations like what we have right here at the City Club, these are the kind of things that we should have.

They are voluntary conversations where we can actually talk to people, and people are open to that conversation.

When you are forced to do it and you know that you may be penalized for not doing it, that changes the nature of it, that is, in fact, violative in many respects of First Amendment because it's a compelled speech issue.

I think that there may well be a few additional things that maybe need to be modified from a technical basis here in the legislation, but at the end of the day, it's intending to rebalance things, not stifle things.

And again, as the sub-bill makes clear, these things can be talked about, and yes, they should be talked about.

I don't think anybody of good conscience would say we shouldn't talk about controversial issues.

The difference though is, is that you shouldn't be penalized if you hold an opinion that's different than your professor.

And we've heard testimony, we are a state legislator out of Toledo, African American Republican legislator out of Toledo testified both in the Senate and in the house on a companion bill, and made clear some of the issues that he himself personally experienced that he said were actually problematic, and made him feel that he couldn't actually be honest.

That is an issue.

And I'll tell you this, we've seen numbers from research, or I should say survey data, where only two in five students said they were comfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor.

80% of students report self-censorship.

And here's something that should probably shock and should actually scare everybody in this room.

Almost two thirds of students surveyed say it's acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus.

That is, again, reinforcing some of the things that Professor Dent said.

And almost one in four, 23%, say it's acceptable to use violence to stop campus speech.

Now, is that free speech?

Is that the Socratic unexamined life at the foundation of Western civilization?

Or is that actually drinking metaphorical hemlock, as I believe somebody did in a trial in Athens a few centuries ago?

Is that appropriate?

Is that what we want?

I don't think that is, and I think what Senate Bill 83 does, is make sure that, that isn't allowed.

- All right, Mr. Lawson, thank you very much.

We're certainly gonna talk about how this would affect the faculty, but a response to some of those survey results, the fact that students feel like they cannot disagree with professors, they cannot have honest or intellectually diverse conversations.

Leader Antonio, your reaction to some of those survey results?

- So, long before I was in the legislature, I was an Adjunct Professor at Cleveland State for about 13 years.

And what I can say is, and that was a few decades ago.

And, I'm trying to think.

And what I can say is, if you had surveyed my students or the students in that higher education body, if you had surveyed students across the country, they would've said the same thing, because ultimately students are there to learn, absolutely.

And actually I had a class where we did have discussions about these very issues that are being basically quashed and banned, banned the mandatory conversation, but chilled for sure.

I think they would say the same thing.

They wanted a good grade.

I also will say that it was not my practice as a professor to spout my belief system.

In fact, what was encouraged in my class, and I believe in the majority of classes across this state in this country, is the use of wanting to have conversation actually that is informative and inclusionary of all of the students, where they come from, their different perspectives.

And to be those critical thinking people, that's what we want ultimately.

If you can't talk about your life experience as a person of color, as a person from the queer community, as a person who has experienced some kind of discrimination, and bring that into the classroom and into your discussion, both as a student and as a professor, then I'm not quite sure what the quality of our conversation is.

I am also very, very concerned, at how are we preparing our young people for the jobs of tomorrow to compete in a global economy, when they are not able to talk about what they have in common, and what they have that's different on the parts of other people.

- We have two panelists here who are currently with universities, so I certainly want to get their thoughts on this.

Senator Cirino, the sponsor of the bill, said that "universities are woke fiefdoms," and that's kind of what he is trying to eliminate or reduce.

So professor, we'll start with you, and then we'll go to Dr. Smith.

Professor, are universities now woke fiefdoms, and why?

- I think a key aspect of what Leader Antonio just said, is that her teaching experience was a couple of decades ago, things have changed.

There are more and more academics who say outright, "we are activists and we want to train our students to be activists."

This is not your father's education.

Things have changed.

And the things Leader Antonio said about wanting an open class, yes, absolutely.

That is what this bill is designed to achieve.

We had on the record in support of this bill, statements from a couple of students, graduate students at Ohio State, one in the Latin American studies program who said that it was unrelieved Marxist-Leninist doctrine.

And another from the School of Social Work saying pretty much the same thing there, that it was all left wing, and it was indoctrination.

It wasn't, here is one view and here's another one, "this is the truth, and you'd better accept it."

So, again, what Leader Antonio said she wants is exactly what this bill is designed to reinstitute what has in many cases been lost, and we now wanna put it back the way it was when there was a degree of free speech available.

- Dr. Smith, your reaction to that, and also your impression of universities as woke fiefdoms?

And what your experience - Yeah.

- with that is?

- So I think one of the important things to remember, is probably close to 80% of the classes offered by university are designed to transmit existing knowledge to students.

And so when you take a class in math, when you take a class in chemistry, you are being taught the state-of-the-art theories of these things.

And it's important that the students learn those, that's not really a place to have debate about these kind of things.

Now, there are classes in the humanities, and I teach in these classes where what we do wanna have is discussion about things that are still open for debate, and to allow that sort of free debate to occur.

And from what I can tell, my colleagues at Kent State in the department of philosophy, in the department of history, in the department of English, really encourage that kind of open discussion.

So I have not experienced this sort of shutting down.

The one thing I will say about coming to a university, is that when somebody, you know, grows up in a small town and you come to the university and you're exposed to different kinds of people who look very different from you, some of them are from different countries, they have different life experiences.

This inevitably creates people that are more tolerant when they are exposed to those other differences among people.

And I think that's actually a good thing about the university.

I don't think that, that's a bad thing about the university.

- Go ahead.

Sure.

- Just one quick point.

As far as breeding tolerance, that would be great.

What we are seeing on many campuses now is precisely the opposite, where a speaker shouted down, and one thing I have to disagree with Greg on, he says, a majority, and often in many cases it's a minority, but a very vocal minority that will shout and shout, and shout to the point where the speaker gives up in speaking.

So to breed tolerance, yes, great, that's what we want to do.

- Mr. Lawson, you can certainly react to any of that.

But I also want to bring up that Senate Bill 83 still prohibits faculty from striking, and in the new version it adds more restrictions to labor negotiations, no bargaining about layoff procedures, workload, or faculty evaluations.

Why is that a good thing?

- Well, I'll get to that.

- Sure.

- And I do wanna say, I think, again, look, we want to have this diverse, and I don't think there's anything in this bill that says it, again, you have the ability for people to talk and have conversations.

Nothing is prohibitive of that.

That doesn't happen.

What is prohibited is that there are ideas that are enforced as saying you have to essentially adhere to this or you don't get your grade, in which case that intimidates people into silence.

And I think we just need to keep reiterating, there's not mandatory destruction of anything there, it's simply saying that we want to have, and I guess, bring back what we have had historically in our universities.

As it relates to the issue associated with the faculty, look here's the concern.

Obviously everybody's worried about student debt here in this country.

We have billions and billions of dollars here.

There's all kinds of debate about how we can resolve and take care of the student debt issue.

And while it doesn't happen often, it can happen that you have a student who's paying their way or having to go into debt to pay their way to get the education that they want, and then because of some kind of internet scene issues that are going on at the university, you can have strikes and things like that, that actually create roadblocks to being able to continue the kind of education that the students have already paid for.

Maybe they can get the funding back, maybe they can't get the money back when they've done it, but it's not good to pull the rug out from underneath students who, again, have already paid their own way.

This is a mechanism in place to avoid having that kind of, sort of Damocles out there that hurts individual students, and makes students who have already paid and are going into debt, have to come back to it.

And again, what the bill really does, I'd have to double check a few of maybe the modifications that are in the sub-bill, but it put the faculty under the statute in collective bargaining that applies to other public workers such as law enforcement, public safety, fire, and a lot of public health officials.

Those officials who are publicly paid employees, today cannot strike in the state of Ohio under the collective bargaining law.

And there is a process, there's fact finding, there's an ability to have an intermediary between management and faculty.

Certainly we understand that faculty could have some concerns about the nature of management, and if the management isn't acting in good faith in the negotiation, we do need to have a neutral arbitrator and a process in place.

And that is essentially what this legislation puts back into place, is an ability to have an arbitrator there.

Now, does that mean that either side gets exactly what they want?

Usually that isn't the case in arbitrations, and that's true, but it also, I think is not accurate.

In fact, I border say disingenuous, to say that this means that this is going to completely tilt everything in favor of management.

And management is basically gonna take a Mack truck and run over everybody.

I simply don't think that, that is what the provisions in Senate Bill 83 would allow for, because if you're saying that, then you'd have to say that the arbitrator, that is agreed to by both parties, management and faculty, is basically so pathetic and bad that they are just gonna lay down on the road and get run over.

I simply don't think that, that is a likely scenario.

I think it's a scare tactic.

I understand the utility of it because I understand the political utility of that, but I think that is simply not how it's really gonna play out.

- Quickly, Dr. Smith?

Sorry.

- So I'm the president of the faculty union at Kent State University.

We have never actually formally declared a strike, but we have come close on a number of occasions.

Our collective bargaining agreement wouldn't even allow us to go on strike until we've gone through a fact finding process.

And there's been a neutral that has made a recommendation for how to reach a fair compromise between the parties.

And yet we have still come to the brink of going on strike, because past administrations haven't been willing to accept, or hesitated, I should say, to accept the fact finders report.

So when faculty go on strike, it is rare, it is usually brief, and it is usually very much a last resort, because we, better than anyone else know what it does to our students.

So it's always a last resort.

It is pretty much the only tool that a union has in their toolkit because the actual rules of collective bargaining favor management, they're the ones that can declare impasse and say, we're gonna impose our last best final offer.

And it's only in that circumstance when an employee union can at that point say, we're gonna use the only tool that we've been given, and that's the strike.

And to take that striker, even the credible threat of a strike away from a faculty union, radically reduces their ability to get a fair deal at the table with management in a great many cases.

That said, we have a very good relationship currently with Kent State.

(panel members laugh) (Deborah laughs) - And that is exactly why this element is in this bill, because it is to take that tool away and to render the negotiations at a back, behind the eight ball right from the beginning.

There's a stance there if you remove that only tool.

And it applies, my understanding in the sub-bill as well, is it applies not just to faculty, - [Deborah] Yeah.

- but also to many workers at the University, some of whom are students who are working there.

And by taking away the ability to use that as a leverage, you know, most of the time what faculty and those other workers are actually bargaining for and at the table for are safety and pay concerns.

So the students would benefit by a quick resolution to those disagreements, but not to take away the ability of having the strike.

That's all.

- Last question before we get to the audience Q&A.

Like many bills that are in the legislature, I'm curious about monitoring and enforcement.

How will this be monitored?

How will this be enforced?

And is that going to be a burden on universities, Leader Antonio?

- Well, I think it's a great question.

Too bad the sponsor of the bill isn't here to answer it because he'd probably have the best answer for us with what he was thinking.

But I do wanna say one other thing.

You know, I've heard this, "the woke Armageddon of everything."

And I spoke about teaching a couple of decades ago.

There was a phrase 10 or 20 years ago that was politically correct, so I think, woke, this accusation that's somehow derogatory being put on something, I think people wear proudly the fact that they are awake, and they are paying attention, especially when it comes to wanting diversity, inclusion and equity across the board.

Those aren't just terms for a classroom syllabus.

Those are real life principles for people in this country and in this state.

So I just wanted to say that.

As far as my understanding, again, even with the sub-bill, this will be expensive.

It's not clear who's gonna do the supervising of all of this and the evaluation.

There is one group that's supposed to evaluate, and that's the students.

And that their evaluation of a professor is gonna count for 50% of that professor's evaluation.

You know, the professor, the person who is also grading that student.

This sets up such a terrible situation where I feel like professors and students are caught in the middle of some kind of aggressive contest to see who can catch who first making a mistake.

- Quickly to Professor Dent.

Your thoughts on that 50%, I suppose, weight on the student evaluations, and how you believe this bill would play out, and how it would be enforced at a university like Case Western Reserve?

- Well, Case is a private institution, so it's different.

- Huh, very nice.

(audience members laugh) - Should it be, you know, I'm not gonna take a position now one way or the other if I don't know how much money Case Western gets from the state.

But I would say this, that if it gets money from the state, it should be accountable to the state, to the extent that it gets money from the state, it should be accountable to the state.

And actually, as far as the enforcement, I want to say first about, is this gonna be burdensome for the universities?

We're talking about public universities, they're supposed to be accountable, and this notion that, "oh, that anyone would have the temerity to interfere with our running our own affairs."

No, they're not your own affairs, these are public institutions that are supposed to be accountable.

And if you had the Secretary of State of the state of Ohio, or other departments that said, "oh, we just wanna run our own show, and we don't want anybody intruding in what we're doing," you would say, "wait a second, I thought this was supposed to be a democratic state where the people are supposed to have some say in these things."

And by the way, one other part of the bill is traditionally the role of the trustees.

Now, legally the trustees are the highest legal force, they're like the board of trustees of a corporation, they have the legal power.

What in actuality happens, that their honorary positions and mostly the trustees only care about football tickets.

- Oh, well.

- Sure.

- [Audience Member] Wow.

- Hang on.

- And we're gonna change that.

- And Dr. Smith, as the representative of a public university, what about that idea that as a taxpayer-funded university, you should be accountable to all the taxpayers of the state, open up the books, so to speak, on just about everything?

- Yeah.

I have no problem with sunshine laws and some of the reporting requirements.

I think some of the timeframes in the bill are onerous for the universities.

I know that actually in many cases, the law requires the universities to develop policies that they already have, but then micromanages the specific details of them that would require them to change them, often changing things on the website, changing a whole bunch of stuff that will be expensive and it will take a lot of time, and it's not clear how they'll be able to comply in the timeframe that they've been asked to comply.

I do wanna say though about the student evaluations, and that counting for 50% of how faculty are evaluated, student evaluations, there have been really, really poor response rates to student evaluations.

And so it is not unusual for you to teach a class with 50, 60, 70 students in them, and get five or six student evaluations.

And needless to say, the individuals that do fill out the student evaluations are generally either people who really loved the course or really hated the course.

They're the outliers, they're not the sort of typical student in the course.

- [Glenn] Sure.

- There's also empirical evidence that shows that student evaluations are biased against faculty of color, foreign faculty, older faculty, and female faculty.

- Thank you very much.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Glenn Forbes, host and producer at Ideastream Public Media, and moderator for today's conversation on Senate Bill 83, the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act.

Joining me on stage in opposition to SB 83, is Ohio Senate Democratic Leader, Nickie J. Antonio, and Dr. Deborah Smith, who you just heard from, President of the Kent State Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, and Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University.

In support of SB 83, Professor George Dent, Professor Emeritus of Law at Case Western Reserve University, and a member of the board of directors of the National Association of Scholars, and President of its state affiliate, the Ohio Association of Scholars.

Also in support, Greg R. Lawson, research fellow at The Buckeye Institute.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those joining via our live stream at cityclub.org, or our live radio broadcast at 89.7 WKSU, Ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to tweet a question for the panel, please tweet it at the @thecityclub.

You can also text your question to 330-541-5794.

330-541-5794.

City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

First question please.

- [Audience Member] Over here.

It's submitted via text.

"In what ways does the legislation actually address the cancel culture behavior and perceptions that Greg Lawson spoke of?"

- Sure.

I think the first thing is, there is a modifying of the university mission statements to make sure that there's clarity regarding the diversity of intellectual ferment that happens on our university campuses.

I think that's the first piece of it.

I think that you have seen some of the issues where, again, we're taking away some of the mandates that are regarding some of the DEI, and I think that's critical that it's the mandates.

We are not taking away the ability for people to choose to do it voluntarily.

I guess I find it remarkable that so many people seem to think that imposing that is a great idea, and that, that's gonna make people really feel a certain way, as opposed to making people play act a role because they feel like they have to do it.

Now, if all you want is compliance, maybe that's okay, but I think if you want people to really believe in this stuff, people need to come to this.

That's why we have to have the versatility and the open intellectual environment, is so that people come to these things.

We want diversity and we want people to actually believe in diversity, not just parrot the right lines because that's a particular role they've been assigned.

I think some of those provisions will go a long ways.

I think that some of the other issues with some of the faculty, I mean, we didn't even talk about this, but there's a post-tenure review aspect to this legislation that might need some modification.

I think that there's some openness to reforming some things there, but I think that's also helpful in making sure that if you do run into a case where there is a more aggressive sort of impositional aspect to trying to impose views on students, there's some mechanisms in place.

I will say though, I did just wanna just mention, I think there's some room for some modifications on some of the timelines, and some things like that.

And I think that there should be some discussion about some of the evaluation piece of it.

I think that they're technical aspects of the legislation that probably do need some additional work.

So I don't think it's a completely finished product, but I think that the general direction of the bill is absolutely 100% correct, even if there still needs to be a little bit of work done kind of when you're tinkering around under the hood.

- It's not finished 'till it's finished.

Second question.

- [Audience Member] So, first of all, I wanna thank the City Club for having this forum on this very, very dangerous bill.

My question is to Mr. Dent and Mr. Lawson.

Have either of you ever experienced a DEI training, and if you did, what was wrong with it?

And if you haven't, what's wrong with it?

- I have not.

I'm retired now, so I guess I avoided that.

But many people have undergone these report that it is brow beating.

The purpose is to inculcate a particular ideological position.

And I think, Greg, you already mentioned, you maybe you want to speak, you mentioned before the findings from the "Harvard Business Review?"

- So I have not personally gone for a, but I will say this, this is from "The Harvard Business Review, why diversity programs fail."

I think that a lot of this comes down to the fact, I mean, this isn't, you know, people going and talking about anti-woke stuff, This is "The Harvard Business Review" talking about it from an academic business case-type process.

And I think that the perspective is, we want these things to actually be successful.

And actually that's what I would say too.

I think that what I'm trying to get at is, when you make things mandatory, you can make people do an awful lot of things through compelled speech.

It's when you actually convince people, when you're able to have a dialogue with people.

I mentioned, I opened this whole thing up talking about Socrates and the Socratic method, which is a dialogic message, right?

You're having a dialogue with folks.

That's what we want to have.

And I think that when you do these things that are mandatory, by the very nature of it being mandatory, you are taking away the ability for people to feel like they're actually engaged in the dialogue.

And I think that's the philosophical and core intellectual challenge that I see with respect to this.

And it's not just me talking about it, it's this, and I've got other things, I'd be happy to chat offline and bring up.

There's a number of academics who even believe in DEI and implicit bias, and a lot of the things that are out there, who think that we do need to talk about those things.

But that the way that we have chosen to go about doing it is actually negative, it actually has a deleterious effect on people actually buying into those concepts.

I would think that, that would maybe make some folks be a little nervous about, are you actually accomplishing what you want accomplish when you're putting this on in a mandated sort of fashion?

- And, you know, from the bill language, you have to ask yourself, yeah, what is the concern there?

Because the specific concepts, the definition is, allyship, diversity, social justice, sustainability, systemic racism, gender identity, equity or inclusion.

And under specified ideology, also not allowed for the university to weigh in on, any ideology that classifies individuals with identity groups, divides identity groups, divides them from oppressors and the oppressed, describes advantages, disadvantages, or segregation based on identity group membership.

So you can teach the letters from the Birmingham Jail from Martin Luther King, it's required in this bill, but you can't talk about why he got there.

(audience members clap) Sorry.

- Thank you.

Before we get to the next question, a response from Mr. Lawson?

- I'm not sure that I would say that you're banned from that, I don't think that's actually the intent of the bill, nor do I think that's, I think what it's saying is, the university itself cannot take positions, but individual professors can discuss these things, and that's the point.

And in fact, involved in reality, it's a university, it's paid by taxpayers who are all over the map philosophically, the university probably shouldn't be taking official positions on most issues as an institution, however, individual folks, I know there's nothing in this bill that means that a professor can't write an op-ed to the "Cleveland Plain Dealer," or "Crain's Cleveland," or anything else they want to do.

There's nothing that prohibits them from being able to have the conversations in their classroom.

So again, I come back to the point here of saying, this is not squelching and banning, and doing all of that kind of stuff.

It's simply not doing that.

It is simply saying you can't force those things.

And we are trying to open up the space to have a broader base of diversity of discussion from an intellectual standpoint.

So even in these concepts, these concepts can clearly be discussed in classes, in universities after Senate Bill 83 passes.

- [Glenn] Quickly, Dr. Smith.

- [Deborah] I just wanted to point out that you're right about the institution there, but bill explicitly says that an institution will declare that it will not endorse or oppose as an institution any controversial belief or policy, specified concept or specified ideology.

The senator just read the specific examples of these controversial policies and specified ideologies.

And I do not know why in this day and age it's considered at all controversial to affirm that there is continued systemic racism, and sexism and bias against people for their gender identity, their sexual orientation, their trans status.

I can't believe that, that is something that is considered at all controversial.

- (audience members clap) - We can certainly continue to react, but next question please.

- On behalf of MC2, and the young 2024 class, long-term thinking, because next year, that'll be our graduation year, how will this affect us and our collegic path?

- Yeah, interesting question.

Kind of gets into the monitoring and enforcement, and what kind of, I guess, adjustment period there could be for this bill, Leader Antonio?

- Well, it's a really good question.

Thanks for being here, and thanks for asking the question.

It could affect what your decisions about where you wanna go to school.

That concerns me a lot because if we pass this bill and institute this into our public universities and colleges, are students gonna take a second thought and say, "I don't know that I wanna go to a university that has these kinds of policies that have been imposed on them," but they have to follow.

And you may make a different decision about where to go to school, I would imagine.

- President Dent.

- Well, you know, I recall reading about a student telling a new freshman, "the first thing you learn is, never say what you're thinking."

And so what will this bill mean for you as a new student in college?

I hope it will mean that you won't have to be afraid to say what you're thinking.

Now, Dr. Smith referred to the idea of tolerance.

I hope it will breed tolerance in this respect.

Again, take the example of what happened at Stanford recently, that was an example of intolerance.

When a speaker is shouted down by a minority, because it wasn't even about what he was talking about.

It's because of things and positions he had taken before, they shouted him down, they wouldn't let him talk.

I hope that you will be attending a university where that kind of thing will not happen.

- Dr. Smith, we have seen things like that before.

In this case that Professor Dent is referring to, there was a judge who was invited to speak, and some students were critical of his previous decisions on the bench, I believe he was also a Trump appointee, which riled up the crowd a little more, I suppose.

Do you see these things happening across the country and in your experience at Kent State?

- I think they're actually relatively rare.

I mean, they do occur, and I think it's completely inappropriate in an academic setting to shout someone down when they're talking.

It's totally separate to exercise your right to protest outside of a talk.

There's plenty of ways that students and others could express their opposition to the speakers.

And I do agree that it's inappropriate to shout them down in that way.

But I don't think it happens as often as the proponents of this bill seem to think it does.

And when things like this happen on campuses, all of our universities already have policies that allow people to file formal complaints if they feel like they've been silenced or intimidated for any reason.

Those policies then call for investigations where both the complainant and the respondents get due process rights.

And all of our universities have mechanisms whereby people that have been found to violate the law, or just university policy, can undergo disciplinary measures up to and including termination, even of tenured faculty.

So when these kind of things occur, and they occur rarely, I would encourage the individuals to use the mechanisms that already exist at your university to file a complaint.

This law is not needed to enforce that.

- Going back to the issue of student evaluations.

Dr. Smith, you talked about many of the problems, and I know there's a lot of research on problems with student evaluations.

Even, you know, you may get evaluations only from the outliers.

Are the evaluations due after the final grade or before the final grade?

Are students mandated to provide evaluations?

So my question is, on the one hand, tenured faculty can be fired based on evaluations, and on the other hand in the amendment, they're taking it outside the realm of collective bargaining.

And so the amendment is saying you can't even negotiate about evaluations.

Can you connect the fact that you're firing faculty, and then the faculty, you're removing their voice from some of the safeguards that could have been negotiated?

- [Deborah] Yeah.

So, thank you for that question.

At least at Kent State, I can't speak to other universities.

The student evaluations are conducted before final examinations, but the faculty member does not see the evaluations until grades have been submitted.

The evaluations are anonymous, so there's actually no way to actually investigate whether the things that have been alleged actually occurred.

I have gotten student evaluations that say completely off-the-wall things.

I think one of my favorite comments in the student evaluations was, "Ooh, the lights.

Ooh, the colors."

I didn't quite know (audience members laugh) what that was supposed to mean.

- Somebody may have had a little bit too much there.

- Yeah.

But if you're then gonna take these completely anonymous complaints that you can't follow up on, and which a faculty member has no ability to defend themselves against 'cause they aren't allowed to know who made these complaints or get any more information about that, that's highly problematic.

And when faculty are prohibited from bargaining the terms and conditions of employment that surround things like disciplinary actions, like evaluations, like retrenchment in cases of global pandemics, that's a serious, serious erosion of collective bargaining rights.

And one of the things I wanna say to the young man over here, that one of the things students need to know is that our state institutions, not just the state institutions, every university everywhere competes on a national and international playing field for faculty.

They're not just competing for faculty here.

And this bill will make particularly tenured and tenure track jobs in Ohio so unattractive, that Ohio will not be able to attract talented faculty.

Our world-class faculty that are here now will leave, the quality of education you will be able to get at one of Ohio's universities will go down, and you might be better off looking to go to college outta state.

So that's one of the worries I have, 'cause that would impact students, it would impact our economy.

And it would really take the state in the wrong direction.

- [Glenn] I wanna get to one more question, please?

- [Sean] Thank you very much.

Sean Brennan, State Representative from Parma, proud City Club member and former public school teacher for 30 years.

As a legislator, I'm really concerned about trying to find ways of retaining and attracting young people to Ohio.

I'm seeing some of the bills in my primary and secondary ed committee in the house, and then bills like this one as well being of detriment to that goal.

So could the panelists speak to that a little bit?

- [Glenn] Yeah, dovetails off Dr. Smith's point.

- [Sean] Thank you.

- Leader Antonio, and then Mr. Lawson.

- Well, sure, and I share their concern.

In the economic bottom line, especially in Ohio, Ohio's considered a global leader, especially in education.

The colleges in just Ohio State brings over 7.5 billion labor income, and 660, 600,000, I'm sorry, $6,631 million in tax revenue to state and local governments.

And that's just Ohio State.

So take that times all of our colleges and universities around the state, and this puts us in great jeopardy for continuing to be that leader for sure.

And that is a huge concern for me.

- Mr. Lawson?

- Well, I guess I'll say, that I don't really think these bills will have a negative impact.

And I'll say what does have a negative impact is the overall economic climate in the state of Ohio.

Ohio's been declining for decades.

We've lost, what?

We're down to 15 congressmen, we've lost eight, or we we're at like, 24, I think, in the 1960s.

Our population has not kept up with the south and west because they're creating jobs at a faster clip.

People are moving to those locations.

This is a multi-decade problems.

North Carolina and Georgia are gonna eclipse us in population according to the US census and the next census.

And these bills are not going to forestall that either by the way, if these bills pass, I don't think that's gonna completely stop that, but it certainly, if you didn't pass these bills, it's not gonna forestall that either.

We have much bigger problems in the state of Ohio, taxes, regulations, local government issues.

We need to figure out how to make Ohio a pro-growth state.

We simply are not a pro-growth state, and we haven't been a pro-growth state for half a century now, And I'm glad to see that we're coming back to Ohio as the heart of it all.

I don't know if anybody saw that we got our new motto, it's coming back to Ohio.

The governor just announced that this week, that we're coming back, that's good.

We have some potential with some of these big jobs, but this is not that place.

This is how do you create the incentive there?

And I will also say it's about community colleges, workforce development, and being able to create pipelines.

And frankly, universities are very important in R&D, and research, and doing things like that.

But you know what's gonna be at the nexus of getting people employed, and employed fast with certificates for in-demand jobs?

Getting community colleges funded appropriately, which we do not do in the state of Ohio, because we over-subsidize the four years, frankly.

- All right, thank you very much.

That was fun, let's do it again soon.

(audience members laugh) - (Greg laughs) - 'Cause this is not going away.

Thank you very much to Leader Antonio, Professor Dent, Mr. Lawson and Dr. Smith for joining us at the City Club today.

The City Club would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga Community College, the Jewish Federation of Cleveland, MC2 Stem High School, and The Buckeye Institute.

Thank you for being here with us today.

Next Friday, May 19th, the City Club will welcome Ferragon CEO Eduardo Gonzalez, for discussion about entrepreneurship and innovation in northeast Ohio.

Ethan Karp, CEO of MAGNET, will moderate that conversation.

Then on Saturday, May 20th, the City Club will join "The Cleveland Orchestra" at the Tinkham Veale Center for a free forum during the 2023 Mandel Opera & Humanities Festival.

Ideastream Public Media's Rick Jackson will lead a discussion examining how the idea of the American Dream has played out in Cleveland.

You can learn more about these in all the forums at cityclub.org.

That brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Leader Antonio, Professor George Dent, Mr. Greg Lawson, and Dr. Smith.

Thank you members and friends of the City Club.

I'm Glenn Forbes, this forum is adjourned.

(Glenn rings a bell on the table) (audience claps) - [Deborah] Thank you.

- [Announcer] For information on upcoming speakers or the podcast of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

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