Unwieldy bill would destroy higher education in Ohio| American Historical Association
"Though this legislation might appear to respond to public concerns about history education, it does not," James Grossman and Anne Hyde
James Grossman is executive director of theAmerican Historical Association.
Anne Hyde is professor of History at the University Oklahoma and vice-president of the American Historical Association.
The people of Ohio can take pride in a public university system that offers a high-quality education at campuses spread widely across the state.
Some members of the state legislature, however, seem prepared to sacrifice this asset to ideological special interests undermining both educational content and the institutions themselves.
Ohio Senate Bill 83, perhaps best summarized as an unwieldy omnibus of contradictory mandates, would not only enable, but even require classroom-level intervention by state officials.
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To ensure that faculty "not seek to inculcate any social political or religious point of view," Senate Bill 83 requires all course syllabi to be reviewed for keyword searches and content management.
Surveillance closely resembling the Soviet Union.
We agree that classrooms must be spaces where students can experiment with ideas without worry about ideological boundaries, places where teachers stimulate students to explore freely without "inculcating" anything other than the value of intellectual curiosity and disciplinary rigor and ethics. But oversight of this kind, scrutinizing content at the microscopic level of keywords smacks less of guaranteeing the ideological diversity cited in the legislation than government surveillance more closely resembling the Soviet Union or Communist China than a public university system in the United States.
One wonders what the overseers will be looking for. Any respectable course in U.S. history will be chock full of references to racism, white supremacy, nativism, second-class citizenship, class conflict, forced migrations, and other terms likely to raise eyebrows of guardians of a version of history devoid of conflict and division.
Freedom, innovation, liberty, democracy, dissent, markets, and other concepts that characterize admirable aspects of our national past would also be part of that course.
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History ignored, minimized.
Senate Bill 83 focuses especially on required U.S. history courses, claiming legislative intent merely to prohibit “requiring” or “encouraging” students to endorse a particular ideology. However, the law requires teaching only six particular political documents in all U.S. History courses.
Such narrowness, without comparing those documents to a wider range of what Americans have read, discussed, and debated, is the very definition of teaching “ideology.”
American history is steeped in divisions and conflicts shaped by ideas about race and by cultures and institutional structures that perpetuate those divisions.
This is fact, not theory or ideology.
To ignore, or even minimize, those divisions render it impossible to create the bridges and shared understanding necessary to maintain national unity. To heal wounds requires acknowledging, locating, and understanding them.
Healing, however, is not the purpose of this legislation.
Couched in barely concealed euphemisms, the bill enforces an education that whitewashes the history of our nation and its people. Keeping to the margins such central issues as slavery; forced removals of Native Americans; and inequalities based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other characteristics excludes material likely to inspire the vigorous discussion that characterizes a good history class. If a college instructor cannot assign material that will make students “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex,” as Senate Bill 83 dictates, how are students to understand what it meant for some people to own, buy, and sell human property and others to experience enslavement, commodification, and everyday violations of their humanity?
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The past is filled with decisions, relationships, and events that can easily make us feel uncomfortable about our predecessors. A good history instructor makes it clear that nobody in the class should feel responsible for what their ancestors did. But only by understanding what happened in the past can the students work to shape a better future.
Though this legislation might appear to respond to public concerns about history education, it does not.
An attack on critical thinking
Professional, nonpartisan survey data indicates overwhelming and bipartisan public support for what the vast majority of history educators actually teach on this subject: that slavery and racism have played a key role in shaping American history, and that their influence reverberates into the present.
According to a recent national survey conducted by the American Historical Association and Fairleigh Dickinson University, three-quarters of both Republicans and Democrats support teaching history about “harm that some groups did to others” even if it causes students some discomfort.
Surveys by the American Association of Colleges and universities (and others) indicate that employers look for critical thinkers who know how to ask questions rather than memorize answers.
Senate Bill 83 is not only a danger to the quality of history education. It poses a threat to public higher education itself.
It would inappropriately inject university boards of trustees into decisions about faculty hiring and work responsibilities — an intrusion across the boundary of governance and management in any nonprofit entity.
Similarly, the bill would replace evidence-based locally designed teaching and research evaluations with procedures and rubrics created by state officials, raising additional concerns about political intrusions on academic freedom.
Everything has a history. What is really at stake with Senate Bill 83 is the quality of preparation of Ohio university graduates. If passed, this bill would undermine education in Ohio by preventing qualified instructors from teaching honest and accurate history.
James Grossman is executive director of the American Historical Association.
Anne Hyde is professor of History at the University Oklahoma and vice-president of the American Historical Association.