Opinion: Ohio lawmakers hostile to colleges, universities. Politically-motivated plot proof.

Gretchen McNamara is president of the Ohio Conference American Association of University Professors.

State Senate Republicans hope Ohioans won’t mind that their reckless and unpopular overhaul of higher education, Senate Bill 83, was amended into the Senate-passed version of the state’s operating budget bill.

Maybe they don't care what Ohioans think.

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Good policy doesn’t get shoved into a 9000-page budget bill.

Bad policy – especially bad policy that attacks public services and public workers–often does, however, get buried in this way.

While this Senate Bill 83 language added to the budget bill imposes numerous new mandates on public colleges and universities, the Senate failed to provide commensurate funding for compliance.

Senate Republicans are thus complicit in driving up costs for students – adding to the overhead of our universities at a time when less than a quarter of each tuition dollar goes to the direct cost of instruction.

This state budget is another that treats higher education as less than a priority, all while legislators speak effusively about workforce development.

The intent could not be clearer: the Senate GOP wishes to control higher education down to how topics can be discussed in the classroom, but it has no interest in adequately funding higher education.

As many senators sit comfortably in their gerrymandered districts, they have no sense of accountability to the average Ohioan.

The same senators who stood on the Senate floor and defended the resolution to make it harder to amend the state constitution – now State Issue 1 on the August 8 ballot–did so under the guise of protecting Ohioans from meddling out-of-state interests.

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Yet these same senators welcomed and passed Senate Bill 83, a bill largely originated with out-of-state interest groups working from very distorted and self-serving stereotypes of higher education.

Those interest groups want to undermine the principles that have made U.S. higher education an international model and to impose their own ideological agenda that has no record of success academically or otherwise.

On April 19, a record-number of 549 Ohioans submitted SB 83 opponent testimony and more than 100 people showed up at the Statehouse to testify directly to the Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

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Hundreds more filled the Statehouse rotunda to show their opposition. Some witnesses waited more than seven hours to testify. Most of them were students concerned about the quality of their educations and ultimately the value of their degrees.

They are right to be concerned.

As Sen. Jerry Cirino attempts to invoke students as a shield for SB 83, it couldn’t be clearer that the vast majority of students oppose his bill.

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While some elements of the bill have changed, Senate Bill 83 remains a politically-motivated, big-government overreach that attempts to micromanage higher education institutions, to compromise the way faculty teach in classrooms, and to bar campus workers from striking.

This attempt to control colleges and universities and to undermine workers’ rights is another step toward authoritarianism.

The mere introduction of this bill and its projection of hostility toward faculty and higher education are driving away talented teachers and researchers from Ohio, and it certainly would continue to do so if it were to become law. Ohio can’t afford this brain drain.

SB 83 has no business becoming state law, let alone being part of the state budget bill. If the General Assembly wishes to continue consideration of this bill despite massive public opposition, then it deserves to go through the full legislative process with additional public scrutiny.

The budget conference committee should swiftly remove this language from the operating budget. Ohioans should be appalled by SB 83, but even more so by the lack of process that Senate Republicans have employed to impose Senate Bill 83 without further consideration.

Gretchen McNamara is president of the Ohio Conference American Association of University Professors.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Republican attempt to hijack Ohio college, universities appalling| Opinion