Professor: Lawmaker's vague crusade forcing me from department, but truth won't be silenced

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University.

I’ve been a professor of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University 17 years.

Two weeks ago, I was informed by a friend with close connections to the Ohio legislature that a bill was about to be introduced that would effectively abolish my department.

I initially strategized how I could fight Senate Bill 83, the “Enact Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act,” as I did last year when a ban on “critical race theory” was debated (I was teaching a seminar on that subject at the time).

Instead, I asked my boss for a transfer to a different department.

Professor: 'Only the brave and foolish' will teach about race, ethnicity if bill passes.

I’ve not changed my mind about the importance of teaching what we teach in ethnic studies.

Rather, I’ve concluded that nothing in this bill will prevent me from discussing all the topics I routinely do as long as I do it under a different banner.

Perhaps it's time to change our titles and names as such terms as “ethnicity” “diversity” and “equity” seem to upset so many people who don’t know what they mean. Senate Bill 83 does not even attempt to define these terms that it bans.

Why so we have ethnic studies in the first place?

African American studies, Native American studies, Asian American studies, Latino/a studies, and other ethnic studies were fought for and established by students in the 1970s who recognized that the role and experiences of racial minorities were left out of their courses.

As the overwhelmingly white and male academic establishments in history, sociology, English, and philosophy resisted opening their disciplines to diverse viewpoints, establishing separate ethnic studies programs ensured that the vital perspectives of people of color would have a foothold in the university.

I’m proud that Bowling Green State University established the first ethnic studies department outside of California and the first cultural diversity requirement in its general studies curriculum.

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But times have changed and today the intellectual insights pioneered in ethnic studies have come to be embraced by traditional disciplines.

I will have no problem teaching all the concepts and theories I usually do in the history department. In fact, as Senate Bill 83 specifies the themes that all state institutions must include in a general education requirements course I’ve already worked up some lesson plans.

The bill mandates that this required class cover the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, “5 essays from the Federalist Papers," the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.

Here is part of my syllabus:

Week 1: Discuss leading theories of how the patriot’s determination to protect slavery led to the American Revolution and how the rise of “scientific” racism influenced Jefferson’s wording of the Declaration of Independence.

Week 2: Consider scholarly debates about the ways in which the U.S. Constitution advanced slavery and established a system of structural racism that denied African and Native Americans basic human rights.

Week 3: Examine the views and actions of the authors of the Federalist Papers. Why did Madison, Jay, and Hamilton all demand that Britain return the thousands of fugitive slaves they protected in New York City so they could be tortured and killed as a lesson to others? Why did Jay, who claimed to be an abolitionist, drag his young slave Abbe to Paris? Why did he have her hunted and thrown into a dungeon (where she perished) when she ran away?

Week 4: Exploration of Lincoln’s reluctance to turn the Civil war into one of liberation until African Americans forced his hand. Discussion of why, even after Emancipation, Lincoln tried to arrange the expulsion of all black Americans to Central America.

Week 5: How was the promise of the Gettysburg Address to “have a new birth of freedom” undermined by a conservative Supreme Court? Did pervasive white racism that cheered the growth of Jim Crow abort that birth?

Week 6: Discuss what King meant when he referred to the “white power structure” of Birmingham and of America. What is this “structure” and how did it operate? We will attempt to understand the evils King complained of, such as “police brutality," “racial injustice," and “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society”.

I will miss my colleagues in my old ethnic studies department, but my first duty is to my students who I’m eager to help think more deeply about the nature of their own country.

Whether I call my course “history” or “civics” or what-have-you, we will still talk about the same things and high on the list is what King meant in his letter when he wrote, “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor of ethnic studies at Bowling Green State University.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Professor: Ohio Republicans making me quit my department