July 3 – The Ohio Senate has approved a six-member Academic Council to lead Wright State University’s state-mandated Center for Civics, Culture and Workforce. The council will soon begin pursuing the goal of protecting conservative ideals on campus.
The Senate vote was along party lines, with Democrats rejecting the initiative and being critical.
According to Senator John F. Kennedy, the first task of the new Academic Council will be to appoint a director for Wright State’s Civics, Culture and Workforce Center. Jerry CirinoR-Kirtland. Cirino has been a driving force behind the state’s recent moves to create five institutes across the state to preserve and protect conservative ideals on college campuses at a cost of about $24 million over the next two years.
“That’s the main job (of the board), and they certainly can have some ongoing responsibilities in terms of monitoring how the program is going, the director can report on progress and things like that,” Cirino said. “But it’s not going to be an awful lot of work for these board members on an ongoing basis.”
Under state law, the council members were nominated by the WSU board on June 14, then went to the Senate for approval.
They are Greg Sample, Wright State’s Executive Vice President & Chief Operation Officer; Laura Luehrmann, chair of the School of Social Science and International Studies; Burhan Kawosa, vice president of Finance, Planning and Analysis; Rick Schwartz, chairman of Winsupply; retired Lt. Gen. Tom Owen of ZaiStar Consulting; and Mark Ridenour, the new chairman of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
Cirino told this news organization that he and the Senate Committee on Higher Education, which he chairs, were looking for candidates who could counter the biases that he said already exist on public university campuses.
“We’re looking for balance,” Cirino said. “Most of the teaching, particularly the social sciences, on campuses today is very left of center, and there’s an underrepresentation of what I would call neutral or conservative approaches to teaching government and history and things like that. That was our general intent in setting up these centers.”
According to Cirino, the political preferences of the individual nominees did not play a significant role in their considerations.
Once operational with a director, Wright State’s Citizenship Center will be tasked with designing courses in five areas of study, in accordance with new state law. These topics include: the foundations of free societies; the American constitutional order, which encompasses the United States Armed Forces; responsible and informed citizenship; the purpose and role of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; and the needs of the base’s workforce.
Cirino anticipates that the classes will be elective and available for a wide range of majors, but the specific details are not outlined in the Ohio Revised Code.
Democrats have long questioned the need for state-run centers dedicated to the dissemination of free speech, yet they have also voted against specific nominees for personal reasons.
“For Wright State, we didn’t have any issues with any of the centers in particular, but we continued to have our concerns about these centers and how unnecessary they were,” said Casey Rife, Senate Democratic communications director.
Cirino told this news organization that the center needs a seventh member after an unnamed judge withdrew just before the Senate was set to vote.
Wright State’s nominees were the fourth of five panels to be confirmed by the Senate. The academic councils of the civic centers at Ohio State University, the University of Toledo and Cleveland State University have already been settled, making Miami University the only institution yet to confirm such a council.
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