Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The Columbus Dispatch on June 13, 2024. It is crossposted here with permission.

American higher education is in trouble.

In Ohio, enrollment in universities is lower today than a decade ago, and in just the last few months Notre Dame College and Eastern Gateway Community College announced they were closing.

Nationally, often violent, anti-Israeli campus protests this spring demonstrated vicious anti-Semitism and a disregard for the rule of law, sometimes preventing other students and campus administrators from performing their duties.

We are retired professors at three prominent Ohio universities— the Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and Ohio University. Somewhat reluctantly, we have concluded that our universities need some outside adult supervision.

Attempts by massive diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies to push state schools to adopt a radical left ideology and stifle intellectual diversity have been appalling; for example, over 100 DEI bureaucrats work at Ohio State alone.

Traditional parts of general education curricula, such as teaching about our history and the development of civic institutions arising from our federal and state constitutions, have been downplayed or even eliminated on many campuses.

Accordingly, we, all members of the Ohio chapter of the National Association of Scholars, testified before the Ohio legislature in favor of Senate Bill 83, introduced by Sen. Jerry Cirino, which dealt with the issues mentioned above such as by prohibiting forcing members of state university communities to sign diversity statements pledging support of a left political agenda.

The legislation proposes several other positive things such as prohibiting irresponsible faculty strikes during the middle of an academic term, which damages the education of tuition-paying students. It shortened the excessive (nine-year) terms for the state university boards of trustees, and regulated the potential misuse of faculty tenure.

S.B. 83 handily passed in the Ohio Senate and cleared the higher education committee in the Ohio House of Representatives.

However, Speaker Jason Stephens has blocked consideration of the bill by the entire House, ostensibly because he doesn’t think the votes are there to pass it.

Cirino disagrees.

As The Columbus Dispatch recently reported, Gov. Mike DeWine acknowledges the need for some legislative action.

We implore Stephens to let the democratic process unfold and allow the House to vote on this needed reform.

Many other states have enacted restrictions on DEI activities. Several prominent universities, for example, the Universities of North Carolina, Florida and Texas have moved to completely shut down or severely restrict DEI efforts that enforce an authoritarian leftish ideology on members of the campus community, usually in response to gubernatorial or legislative pressure.

Stephens, we beg you: Allow the political process to assess, and likely approve, efforts to curtail the heretofore largely successful efforts of a woke supremacy to curtail the freedom of expression and intellectual diversity that’s so essential to operating a vibrant system of state universities.

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