Autonomy and Higher Ed Reform in Ohio

In my introduction to comparative politics seminar, a course taught to a broad range of students from Political Science majors to Business Administration majors, we distinguish between capacity and autonomy. In an earlier post I discussed my concerns about the loss of state capacity that we are currently seeing. And I am going to come back to that in much greater detail soon. But we are also seeing a change in the level of autonomy that the state (and states!) has (have).

Autonomy is a concept meant to describe the state's relationship to powerful social groups. If the state is autonomous from citizens, you might not live in a democracy. If all citizens are in the street protesting pension reform, as we saw in Russia in 2018, but the policy moves forward anyway, then the power of the rulers is likely derived from other sources than from a contract with citizens.

On the other hand, in a democracy, the state is often not autonomous from citizens. In my class, our favorite example of a state that lacks autonomy is France. Have you ever tried to take public transportation in France?! Those workers are protesting all of the time! And because the state is not autonomous from labor, the state often has to negotiate with those forces. The inability of the state to act in the presence of opposition is actually a sign that democracy is alive and well in France.

We sometimes see the opposite relationship - an authoritarian state that is not autonomous from economic elites or military elites, so the relationship varies. In other words, it depends on which groups the state is autonomous from. In a democracy, we want there to be a certain degree of autonomy of the state from military, economic, and religious elites. But when we see autonomy from citizens, this is a concerning development in terms of evaluating the democratic character of the state.

Yesterday Ohio Governor Mike Dewine signed into law SB 1, a law which represents gross overreach into higher education by lawmakers. One of the concerning provisions of the bill is that it requires faculty to post their syllabi online, opening their curricular choices to critique from a variety of groups, virtually none of whom have the credentials to critique what is taught.

I am a university professor and I would not feel comfortable evaluating syllabi even from another subfield in my discipline, let alone from a different department, because disciplinary conventions vary dramatically even within one discipline. I might not know what the most important texts are in the study of health policy, Asian politics, or the study of the American presidency. I would not want my colleagues who study American politics evaluating my Comparative Politics course unless they had taken significant coursework in graduate school in this area and had continued to read the literature in the field.

But these are not the people who are going to critique our syllabi. It is not going to be other professors. The critique is going to come from people who want to shape people's beliefs in a particular way - who have an ideological commitment prior to the pursuit of knowledge. In my field of comparative politics, there is one ideological commitment that is permitted to scholars - that is a commitment to democracy as a form of government, but even some scholars eschew that sacred value in order to pursue a science of politics that is as value-neutral as possible.

Beyond the concerning provisions of the bill, the way it was passed is concerning, particularly as we think about autonomy.

State Senator Jerry Cirino, a Republican from Kirkland, explained that they passed the bill despite massive opposition:

“But this isn’t about how many people show up to protest or to testify in hearings. A lot of those students that were showing up where, I believe, they were being paid or getting extra credit. And we don’t make policy here based on the number of people that show up to protest or testify.”

Setting aside the absurd claim that students were given extra credit to testify (you could not give enough extra credit to convince students to travel to Columbus, wait for an indeterminate length of time, and then make eloquent testimony), the quote suggests that Senator Cirino sees it as a positive characteristic of the bill that opposition to it was ignored. But a legislature that makes policy without consideration for citizen demands is a legislature that has autonomy from citizens.

Republicans hold the majority of seats in the statehouse. It is reasonable for them to make policy according to the preferences of their constituents. But in a democracy we also expect there to be negotiation with the people who are most affected by a piece of legislation. And if that legislation is meant to reshape the playing field on which democratic politics take place (as this bill is), then it weakens the foundation for democratic contestation in the future.

Personally what I would prefer from my statehouse is for it to solve real problems that actually exist, rather than to fight imagined cultural battles that are actually distractions from the real problems in the state of Ohio: a massive opioid epidemic, rising prices, and low housing availability among many other challenges. We have seen this playbook of distracting from governance priorities by focusing on cultural issues before, many times, and it does not inspire confidence in the intent of the legislature to make life in Ohio better for all. And the way the legislature belittles citizen activism does not bode well for democracy in this state or in this country.