While Ohio’s bill mirrors the desire of other red states to eliminate what are perceived as diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, it also includes new goals.
They include prohibiting full-time faculty strikes and undermining academic freedom, which means the ability of faculty to teach and students to learn without interference from the state.
Ohio Senate Bill 1 has passed the Senate and is now before the Workforce and Higher Education Committee in the House.
Even though it states that universities must “educate students by means of free, open, and rigorous intellectual inquiry to seek the truth,” it actually promotes a culture of surveillance and snitching rather than truth-seeking.
Transforming students into ‘police officers’
SB 1 requires institutions to post a plethora of information culled from each undergraduate course’s syllabus, totaling 83 lines of text.
This must be easily accessible from the university’s initial website, keyword searchable, and include all required and recommended readings, as well as all “materials and topics” covered in the course.
The bill also requires state institutions to respond to any alleged violations of policies prohibited by the bill. The bill’s intent is to discourage faculty from wading into “controversial” waters by encouraging private citizens to monitor faculty curriculum through simple keyword searches — “race” for example.
The deputation of ordinary Americans to enforce extremist legislation has increased since a Texas law (Senate Bill 8) allowed private citizens to sue those who had abortions, and Florida’s “Do not Say Gay” law urged parents and others to monitor teachers.
In 2022, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin established a tip line for parents to report instructors teaching “divisive” subjects.
Last summer, Indiana passed legislation requiring public college trustees to discipline professors who do not “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution.”
According to one professor, the result has been the difficult task of teaching while fearing being fired for saying “the wrong thing in class.” His students had become “potential police officers.” Indeed, nothing in the Indiana bill prevents an enraged 18-year-old from seeking swift retribution for the B- he received.
A snitching culture
The Trump administration recently nationalized the culture of snitching by establishing a “End DEI portal” that encourages parents to provide “details of concerning practices” for any school that the informant believes is teaching concepts or using materials they find objectionable.
All authoritarian regimes encourage private citizens to inform on others.
The Gestapo relied on locals to report neighbors who were suspected of hiding Jews or harboring anti-Nazi sentiments. Soviet police relied on civilian informants to report “anti-social” behavior, a practice that has persisted under Putin. North Korea “operates a vast network of informants” who monitor fellow citizens suspected of “subversive behavior,” as does Iran.
An estimated 16 million citizens in China snitch for the government.
In America, as law professors Jon Michaels and David Noll have argued , private enforcement laws and the multiplication of online reporting “portals” not only encourage a culture of private surveillance. They give “rights to people who are merely offended by what they see, hear or imagine,” while removing rights — to free speech, academic freedom, bodily autonomy — from their targets.
SB 1 is deeply flawed in its threat to weaken academic freedom, undermine classroom discussions and eviscerate faculty rights.
By urging private citizens to become informants, SB 1 also hastens the creation of a state which sees fit to enforce its will not through the courts, but by mobilizing an army of snitches.
