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A controversial higher education bill is back, as the sponsor promised.

And it's the top priority for senators.

We'll hear from that sponsor and from the plan's opponents this weekend in the state of Ohio.

Just.

Welcome to the state of Ohio.

I'm Karen Kasler.

As expected, the bill conservatives say will combat liberal indoctrination on college campuses has returned.

And opponents are gearing up to fight back.

What was Senate Bill 83 last session is now set of Bill one, as announced by sponsoring Republican Senator Jerry Serino this week.

Along with the companion House bill sponsor, representative Tom Young and Senate Committee Chair Christina Rovner, who says hearings could start in the next week.

Senate Bill one looks a lot like Senate Bill 83 in several ways.

It includes a ban on most D-ii programs, with some exceptions for federal grant money.

A ban on faculty strikes, which had been eliminated in Senate Bill 83 as a compromise trustee terms of six years, down from nine.

Performance reviews for faculty, including those with tenure, with evaluations by students as a part of that, a ban on universities taking public positions on controversial subjects, a required course covering American history, foundational documents, and capitalism.

A five year cost summary from universities getting state money, a ban on financial partnerships with China, and a requirement that syllabi from classes be published online.

Senate Bill one also adds a review by the Chancellor of the possibility of three year bachelor's degrees for some courses of study.

The bill comes as what are termed independent academic centers are being launched at Ohio State University, the University of Toledo, Cleveland State University, Miami University, and the University of Cincinnati.

These centers, supported by Republicans and funded with $24 million in the current state budget, are expected to teach and research constitutional studies and American history.

I talked to Serino and Young about their bills.

That conversation is coming up.

A dozen or so protesters came to the state House to push back against Senate Bill one, as it was being announced, with the same concerns they had about the previous bill, which got through the Senate and a House committee, but died when then Speaker Jason Stevens said it didn't have the votes to be brought to the floor.

State House correspondent Joe Ingles talked to some of those demonstrators.

As the sponsors of HB one were laying out their bill for reporters in a press conference.

About two dozen protesters were chanting in the hallway outside.

To back background, many that was under my feet.

That is actually stripping us of our freedoms of free speech in the classroom.

And it's an attack on higher ed in general.

For example, they've said in the past that the Holocaust should be taught on both sides, which is insane and very fascist to say.

And yeah, there shouldn't be, room for students to say that the Holocaust has never happened or that the Nazis were correct.

Some professors said it would be impossible to teach certain subjects under the new limitations.

Pranav Johnny says instructors are not indoctrinating students, but rather encouraging them to think critically.

He says it would be impossible to teach some subjects labeled controversial, like Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail, for example.

How can you say students are required to read letter from a Birmingham jail, and also say that structural racism is a controversial topic?

Because guess what he talks about in that letter, by the way?

Guess why he's in jail.

They don't want us to teach the history of how he got into jail in the first place, but they put him in, in a quite tokenistic way to say that they're interested in a black writer as well.

So there's a bunch of racial politics.

There's a bunch of gender politics.

There's anti-China politics.

There's all sorts of things in here that contradict the stated position, which is we're for intellectual diversity and not for one side being presented, you know, and on the other hand, limiting what we can do based on research facts and telling the truth.

And Christopher McKnight Nichols, a history professor at OSU and the Woody Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, said the anti-union provision will be widely opposed, especially since it reaches beyond universities.

I think one of the things we saw with SB 83 was you saw Pipefitters, you saw police unions.

Lots of people didn't like these attacks on union organizing, collective bargaining and that sort of thing.

So I think that's likely to have a much more widespread ramifications than just hiring, you know, other things that I think stand out here are the ones that appear to students to be attacks on their community and identity.

Nick Nichols also said this bill could negatively impact campus groups that support minority students who need support within the university community.

We'll be back.

Students laughed at the assertion made by sponsors of the bill that they're being influenced by liberal woke professors, or that they're getting extra credit for protesting.

But some say if this bill goes through, it will make them and others think long and hard before committing to staying in Ohio.

Joe Ingles, Statehouse news Bureau.

As I mentioned, I sat down with Senator Serino and Representative Young to talk about their bills and why they're needed.

Especially Sen Serino has said some universities are already making changes.

And the five intellectual diversity centers are getting going.

Why is this needed?

You say some colleges and universities have made some changes here.

You've got those five intellectual diversity centers.

Why this bill?

Well, I think it's it's true that since we announced a Senate Bill 83, and as it went through the process in the last General Assembly, many of the aspects in the bill have actually been adopted by, some of the universities and community colleges.

And that's good because they're seeing the need to make these changes.

But I think it's pretty clear that while the civic centers, the five civic centers that you're referring to, they're not all up and running yet, but they're in the process of getting there.

Those are really going to be dealing more with curriculum, in exposing students to diversity of thought and, and, and to civics, documentation, founding fathers, documents and etc., where the rest of the bill really deals with establishing and changing policies, which these five centers can't do.

That's not their task.

The task of changing policy is with the legislature in coordination and hopefully with cooperation from the boards of trustees.

the attention to this bill is going to get mostly will center on things like the ban on Dei training programs, the ban on faculty strikes.

Some of that kind of stuff.

But I want to ask you, Representative Young.

Higher education is important because it trains people to enter the workforce and it, to go out and function in the real world.

So how does this help people do that?

Well, diversity.

What what I believe the bill says to me is that let's get the focus away from Dei and let's focus on true.

Discussion, open discussion and education to educate our workforce, because this has been a focus for way too long in my opinion.

And, Ohio needs to we need to focus higher ed on just not this.

Because if this when we pass this legislation, we need to get back to doing what higher ed does, and that is create intellectual capital.

Well, let me stay with you on this.

Some critics of Dei programs said they encourage division and discrimination.

So what is the alternative?

To encourage inclusion and discourage discrimination?

Because you don't want certain groups to be discriminated against, right?

Well, we do have, federal laws on the books that take care of the discrimination.

And we reference those in the bill.

Right.

So we we are, in essence, putting more a wraparound on a focus that's already taken care of in federal law and state law, right now.

And, like I said to, we've created a sub, subchapter.

And that subchapter has to do with higher education.

And it's unnecessary.

Let me ask you, Senator Serino, there are some changes in the bill that even some critics might think are positive, for instance, six year terms for trustees instead of nine years, because there's been a difficulty in finding qualified people willing to serve nine years, studying the possibility of a three year bachelor's degree.

The, the, syllabi being online, which I think, a lot of people might support, but protesters did show up at your press conference and, they also hundreds of them turned out at a hearing when this was in the hearing process in 2023 and without written testimony, there are a lot of opponents to this bill.

So do you want to convince them that this bill needs their support and you want their support, or is their opposition okay?

Well, look up opposition is fine.

I mean, this is a free speech, bill.

You know what all said and done.

And so it would be ridiculous for me to, to make any comments that would be contrary to their right to, to protest or disagree.

Certainly.

But these are all a lot of the same people that that protested at 83.

And I, I have heard them they have they have come to our committees and testified, we've given them tremendous leeway, in terms of the numbers of hours that we have had hearings, to hear, opponents.

But I think in some of these issues, they're just simply either uninformed or they've already made up their mind and they're simply not open to, seeing anything good in the bill.

I have run into lots of opponents who just say we don't like anything in the bill, and I, I would challenge them and I would challenge anybody in the media to to ask some very basic questions about aspects of the bill that everybody should agree with.

And, and yet they don't seem to be willing to do that.

It's it's Senate Bill 83.

In the past, Senate Bill one.

Now we just don't like it.

And it's bad for education and bad for students and whatever else they want to call it.

And I think they're being disingenuous in that evaluation.

You made some comments about faculty.

And again, there's a ban on faculty strikes, which was compromised out in Senate Bill 83 to get the bill through the House, which it did not get through, obviously.

Otherwise we wouldn't be here discussing this now.

But you made some comments about faculty, that that really, I think, set them on edge, that, they are that they may have given their students extra credit for coming to the protest and and some things like that.

You say this bill is not anti-union.

How do you square those things?

Well, it is it is not anti-union in the sense that if you look at, as I explained in the press conference earlier, that, you know, when a student signs up to for classes for a semester, they have to pay for those instruction hours, right?

Or they can't take the class.

We don't I don't think we do things on credit, very often.

And, that is a contract between the student in the university or community college, and that is that is two parties agreeing for consideration.

It satisfies all of the aspects of a legal contract.

Why do we why would we allow a third party, disinterested party, in a sense, to come in and interrupt that contract from being fulfilled just because they use it as a as a pawn in negotiations to get something that they want, whether it's different working hours, whether it's more vacation, a better dental plan, you know, all of those things.

They can negotiate those things, you know, on, you know, in another manner, with, management of the universities or community college.

There's no reason to allow them to use the student delivery of instruction as a pawn in their negotiating process.

The bill does ban certain things from being negotiated, like the post tenure review and also retrenchment, which is kind of the the whittling down of certain departments.

While retrenchment is important because in the changing environment that we're seeing now with workforce issues that Representative Young just talked about, the needs of our hiring communities, businesses around Ohio are changing.

It's impacting post-secondary education tremendously.

And our universities have to be able to the presidents and the boards have to be able to deftly and quickly move through those changes and make adjustments, whether it's who they hire, how many they hire, what fields of study they're focusing on.

So maybe they need to make a decision soon on having fewer philosophy, professors and have more computer science professors, right.

Because their workforce is demanding that, right now for them to make those changes, it's very cumbersome.

And the faculty think that they can control that and should, and that's not going to work in the future.

Let me ask you, representative Young, about the workforce issue and certain requirement in this bill.

And again, you have a companion bill to this one that's correct in the House.

This requirement of a civics course on American history, key foundational documents, and the fundamentals of free market capitalism.

That course or that those ideas are required to be taught in high schools right now.

But then this would add that to the college curriculum.

Why should students pay extra for those pay part of their tuition for those classes?

If that's not, they don't feel that that's part of their major or they've already taken care of that.

That's a good question.

But I before that, I'd like to comment on the, strike issue.

The intent of Senator Serino and Chairman Serino and myself in our discussions was to make the bill student focused.

Let's not forget about that.

I mean, we have students and families who are sometimes going into debt, many times going into debt, to be educated in Ohio and that's really important to interrupt.

That is repugnant.

I mean, it just doesn't work on the issue of the the requirements for classes.

We've accommodated, those exceptions, if they've if they, if they have taken these courses, they can show that they have already and done that in high school or in some class when they entered through college.

Credit plus or whatever.

We've made accommodations for that in the bill.

But why are those classes important if you're studying, you know, calculus or engineering because of the founding documents and who we are.

And it's interesting, if you go back and look in history, many of the people who wrote those documents were the same ages as the protesters that were protesting today.

Right.

If you go back and research that it's very important for people today to understand where we came from as a country, how we became a republic, and how meaningful that is, because we make a commitment every time we say the Pledge of Allegiance and sing the national anthem to our country.

And they should understand why.

Senator Serino this bill requires a five year cost summary as part of the budget process for the operating budget, as well as the capital budget, which those give hundreds of millions of dollars appropriate, hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges around the state.

You said in the press conference that if that lawmakers have the power of the purse to when it comes to universities complying, if the law passes, does that mean lawmakers can withhold money from universities if they don't like what they're doing?

Well, we've always had that authority and we didn't need this bill.

It's in the bill as a red flag.

Message to the universities and community colleges that reminding them that we can and will we will exercise that appropriately.

So if they thumbed their noses, which I don't expect, but if they were to thumbed their noses at us, and, and not accept the intent of the legislation that we will ultimately pass, you know, we're not going to just keep writing checks and, and, you know, in, in, in that not holding them to what the requirements are.

You've said that the current higher education environment has allowed virtually every discipline to become politicized.

I have to note that most of the people who've been appointed to the five civic centers that we talked about earlier are considered conservative.

They're affiliated with federal society and other groups.

They've talked about woke ideology, criticized Democrats.

Is that fair?

Well, there's a balance.

I have looked at every single one of the five, centers and their appointments or their boards, and I'm tangentially engaged in also discussions on who the who the directors are that get hired.

And so, you know, it's just I think it's coincidental that some of the folks who are naturally attracted to a center like this, a civic center, tend to be more conservative, by by nature.

But we also have we have not, stack the deck.

We have other people who are not necessarily considered, you know, at the fire, right of center, let's say, because we need to have some balance.

And we again, we're talking about diversity of thought here.

It would be ridiculous for us not to represent diverse thoughts on the boards of these five centers.

Former Speaker Jason Stevens said that Senate Bill 83 did not have the votes to pass, and that's why it didn't come to the floor.

Is there support for passing this this time?

Our caucus is, very strongly behind this bill, and I honestly believe, that had we brought, 83 to the floor, it would have passed without question.

Why didn't it then?

I'm not the speaker.

I wasn't the speaker.

If I were have been the speaker and have come to the floor, I will I will add to that if I if I had a I had an hour long discussion with speaker, former Speaker Stevens.

In a year ago in December.

And I went through every aspect of the bill, because I did not know how familiar he might have been with it.

I went through it.

He had a very positive reaction to it.

He told reporters, about an hour later that, he thought it was a priority bill.

I walked away feeling pretty good about its prospects.

And then I don't know what else happened, but it certainly was not a favored bill, anymore.

Not a priority.

And, I think there were political factors involved.

But the bottom line is, he apparently, for whatever reason, did not see the importance of this in both higher education and workforce.

And it's a shame that he didn't see it.

And you won't have that situation this time around, because Speaker Matt Hoffman and Senate President Rob McCauley both were supportive of Senate bill.

Absolutely.

You had said before that there would not be any compromises on this bill if they if Senate Bill 83 didn't get through with the compromises it had.

You would not be compromising this time.

Is there any area on which you are willing to compromise, or do you feel that there's going to be a need for that?

Well, as we go through the hearing process in both the Senate and the House, we may find that there were some unintended consequences.

It happens all the time in bills.

And and we will fix those.

There's sometimes even very simple technical changes, things that we missed, etc.. Or something that's that is goes against existing revised code.

We'll take care of those.

That's the normal process.

But if your question is, are there any of the major components here that we are willing to take off the table?

The answer from my perspective is no.

This bill has gone through, a hardening process, lots of debate, lots of testimony.

And we now know what we need to pass.

And this is it.

You're likely to get a lot of opposition from labor in Ohio, which, of course, came out many years ago to oppose Senate Bill five and its reforms or changes on collective bargaining.

Are you expecting that kind of pushback from unions and all unions across the board, not just faculty unions?

Well, I think the most of the protesting will come from faculty unions, of course.

And again, they they're not ready to embrace change.

They they want to operate the way they've been operating for decades in higher education.

I understand change is not something that we all embrace easily, but they better figure out how to adapt.

And they need to start making one major change.

And that is, they should think of their students as customers.

And when they start to think that, their perspective will change.

And finally, I want to ask you both, Senate Bill 83, what it came through last time around.

The opponents called it the higher education destruction bill.

And they called it a conservative snowflake bill, have pointed to that.

It could potentially involve cancel culture by conservatives who complain about cow cancel culture.

So let me ask you both.

What do you say to people who hold that opinion on this?

When you have open, fair discussion and it's really interesting, over the last week, there's been some exchange, in the house of, of, of, editorial comments and then comments from House members about 83 or SB one.

And, it's really interesting.

I thought about commenting on it, but I didn't because the debate back and forth was hearty, intense, and they disagreed.

And I walked away and went, that's exactly what we're trying to do here, to have that emotion, that passion, that discussion.

And, it just happened right before my eyes.

What about discussion that involves denying the Holocaust and some of these things that are factually untrue, but yet people still find ways to debate them.

Well, look, we've had debate on our campuses, forever, you know, evolution, the theory of evolution has been debated and continues to be debated.

And it's I, I'm a fan of watching some of these debates on that subject.

And, you know, I think it's, I think it's great.

It causes you to think and analyze, come to your own conclusions.

That's what we're talking about here.

If, if a student brings up a ridiculous concept that they happen to believe in.

Look, it won't be the first time a professor has heard something like that.

There's a professional way to deal with it without obstruction.

They're right to express themselves, even if it's a dumb idea or a dumb concept.

What if it's wrong, though?

I mean, colleges are there to teach you what is factually correct.

Colleges are there to teach students to arrive at the truth.

They should be teaching them how to seek the truth, how to analyze all of the various inputs and the facts and to come to their own conclusion, teaching them about a specific concept that you must believe in.

That becomes indoctrination, and that is not what our campuses should be doing.

representative Young's bill has been introduced in the House, but has not been assigned a number.

32 bills have been assigned numbers so far in the Senate, including an energy bill proposal to lower the income tax rate to a flat 2.75%, and two property tax bills.

A circuit breaker for a refundable income tax credit or rebate when property taxes or rent exceed 5% of a person's income, and a tax on high volume landlords.

There's also a bill requiring retailers to allow cash transactions and a ban on tanning beds for minors under 16 years old.

And that is it for this week for my colleagues at the Statehouse News Bureau of Ohio Public Media.

Thanks for watching.

Please check out our website at State News Talk or find us online by searching State of Ohio Show.

You can also hear more from the Bureau on our podcast, The Ohio State House scoop.

Look forward every Monday morning wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for watching and please join us again next time for the State of Ohio.

You.

Just.

Support for the Statehouse News Bureau comes from Medical Mutual, dedicated to the health and well-being of Ohioans, offering health insurance plans, as well as dental, vision and wellness programs to help people achieve their goals and remain healthy.

More at Med mutual.com.

The law offices of Porter, right, Morris and Arthur LLP.

Porter Wright is dedicated to bringing inspired legal outcomes to the Ohio business community.

More at porterwright.com.

Porter Wright inspired Every day in Ohio Education Association, representing 120,000 educators who are united in their mission to create the excellent public schools.

Every child deserves more at OHEA.org.