Ohio SB 83 is a union

In hearings about Ohio's union-busting Senate Bill 83/House Bill 151, state Sen. Jerry Cirino, has expressed some clear misunderstandings about university faculty and how universities work. Much of this could have been avoided if Cirino, R-Kirtland, had taken the time to consult with faculty before introducing this badly flawed legislation.

Cirino has repeatedly said that he is opposed to university employees having the ability to strike because a contract exists between the students who have paid their tuition and the university. That virtual contract, he argues, can't be violated.

And yet he is eager to totally dismiss and violate actual contracts. At the more than a dozen public universities where faculty are unionized, there exist actual union contracts negotiated between the faculty and the administration. Cirino is eager to throw these real legal documents, real contracts — which affect the working lives of thousands of Ohioans — on a bonfire built on his ideological beliefs.

Cirino's union-busting legislation seeks not only to ban striking for all university employees but, for faculty, he wants to turn over the important parts of their work life over to political appointees.

Faculty and administrators have long ago negotiated many of the terms and processes of achieving and maintaining tenure. Under this legislation, tenure will be defined, awarded, and maintained by university trustees. After nearly 16 years of Republican governors, all these trustees are members of the governor's party. These tenure terms will then be approved by another Republican appointee, the chancellor of higher education.

Even though most of our universities have some form of negotiated post-tenure review, Cirino's legislation country mandates a post-tenure review process that can't be negotiated and allows faculty to be terminated on the whim of an administration official.

Lost on Cirino is that tenure exists across the state to protect the academic freedom of faculty from exactly this kind of arbitrary attack by either an administration, the state, or a political extremist like himself. The ability of faculty experts to explore new and controversial ideas in their research or the classroom will be destroyed by this legislation and will make Ohio a pariah in the world of higher ed. Cirino's conception of imposing "intellectual diversity" only makes space for bad ideas in the classroom, like Holocaust denialism as he suggested in recent testimony.

But the bill doesn't stop there. Nearly every university has some kind of annual performance review that has been carefully negotiated between the faculty and the administration. Once again, Cirino's legislation calls for the contractual agreement to be eliminated and substituted for a process to be determined unilaterally by the political appointees and approved by the chancellor.

More:Ohio State's Board of Trustees issue a statement opposing Senate Bill 83

And what if the university gets into genuine financial trouble? The contracts that exist have careful language about retrenchment so that the academic mission of our universities is protected if faculty positions need to be eliminated. We’ve seen administrations behave recklessly when they have mismanaged themselves into financial difficulty, like a few years ago when the administration at the University of Akron slashed departments so badly they left some without any full-time faculty. This legislation would leave faculty without options to protect the students’ education.

Finally, there are Cirino's repeated statements that students are mere pawns in union negotiations because unions use the right to strike as leverage. Had he only taken the time to research this issue, he would have learned that only the faculty have the students' best interests at the forefront. With administrations absorbed with growing bureaucracy, grandiose construction projects, athletic departments that are financial blackholes, undergraduate education is getting lost.

By pressing the administration to maintain and even expand funding of instruction at our universities, and to hire full-time professors, faculty are defending higher education options for students. On average, only about 20% of the public university budgets cover faculty salaries and benefits. That is an actual problem Cirino could be working on, instead of undermining the education of our students.

This legislation can't be reformed and needs to be killed to save Ohio higher education from political control.

John McNay is a professor of history at the University of Cincinnati, a national council member of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and past president of the UC's AAUP chapter.