As always, climate denial is joined at the hip with racism.
In this case, the Ohio legislature narrowly turned down an attempt to ban instruction in “controversial” issues, which would include climate science, or any mention of racism.
Pranav Jani in Truthout:
Ohioans invested in the integrity and well-being of public universities across the state breathed a sigh of relief in late June after Ohio Senate Bill 83 — Republicans’ big push to overhaul higher education across the state — failed in its bid to become law before the summer recess began.
A few of the bill’s lowlights — in its original and revised forms — include:
- banning and regulating how educators teach topics or use concepts that the GOP specifies as “controversial” or “ideological,” including climate change, structural racism, allyship, gender identity, diversity, foreign policy, abortion, immigration policy, marriage, and concepts like oppressor/oppressed;
- conducting surveillance (including “post-tenure review”) of faculty deemed to be “indoctrinating” students;
- banning strikes at universities and restricting faculty voices;
- banning mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) trainings and programs; and
- imposing some boycotts on universities (banning relations with Chinese institutions) while forbidding others (no “boycotts, divestment, sanctions” campaigns, clearly referring to the Palestine solidarity movement, BDS).
SB 83 teems with contradictions. Universities are told not to take positions on matters of public debate — unless they want to support a U.S. war. Ohio’s public colleges are required to teach a U.S. history course including specific texts, but one of those texts, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” contains exactly the kind of critique of systematic racism and language about oppressor and oppressed that SB 83 marks as “controversial.”
SB 83 is not permanently defeated, and its main sponsor State Sen. Jerry Cirino has promised it will come back. As the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) explained, we will have to keep our eyes on SB 83 and related bills until this legislative cycle ends in December 2024. In fact, one of these bills — SB 117, also sponsored by Cirino — was slipped into the state budget and, as our AAUP-Ohio State statement on a previous version of the bill explained, will impose conservative think tanks on several Ohio universities while circumventing established processes of shared governance.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that despite its overwhelming majority in this heavily gerrymandered state, despite the GOP’s loud and bullying propaganda over the last few months, slandering professors and dismissing students who spoke out repeatedly, SB 83 has failed to pass.
The assault on Ohio colleges and universities has been incessant. With the introduction of SB 83 in the Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee in mid-March, right-wing politicians led by Cirino have been making a big push to use the power of the government to limit academic freedom, control what faculty and students learn and teach in the classroom, and give a crutch to conservative ideas that, apparently, aren’t able to thrive on their own merits.
Keeping pace with extremist politicians in other states like Florida and Texas, Ohio GOP leaders were taking every opportunity to denounce professors as “indoctrinating” students; to vilify diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and to label all topics and faculty they didn’t like as “controversial” and worthy of surveillance.
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As intended, SB 83 has had a chilling effect on university life — especially among lecturers and untenured faculty members, graduate students teaching classes and looking for jobs, and students and faculty of marginalized groups.
It’s impossible to describe the cloud that’s been sitting over university faculty over the last few months — at faculty meetings, in private conversations, and in advising meetings with students who feel maybe they made a wrong choice in coming to Ohio to learn.
Pranav Jani is scholar, writer, organizer and social justice activist in Columbus, Ohio. He is associate professor of English, director of the Asian American Studies program, and president of the AAUP chapter at The Ohio State University.
Too bad the extreme left through various and willing allies gave this potent ammunition to the extreme right, much of which resonates with voting and motivated parents of school age and post secondary children. I cannot recall any right wing policy platform with broad appeal other than this.
” I cannot recall any right wing policy platform with broad appeal other than this.”: Please elaborate on what defines broad appeal.
Broad appeal that crosses the partisan divide and is attractive to a majority of voters.
I’m done searching trying to finding any polls that backs up that statement. Found old polls that refute it, but times change.
Today from Allan Stratton:
“This radical attempt to unilaterally impose a new social order based on race and gender essentialism has ignited a widespread public backlash, which has been weaponized by the far right, destroyed public goodwill, and done more damage to the progressive cause than anything its reactionary enemies have done in recent years.”
As far as I can tell, this movement is the only fuel the more extreme right has to work with. The movement sweeping the left capturing so many institutions also comes replete with targeted denialism of reality (biological sex, history, transgendered genocide, white privilege, etc), a denialism often attributed only to bigots of the extreme right. Au contraire. The soft bigotry of the left is epidemic and systemic and widespread denialism of reality and distrust of science now commonplace because it’s painted as virtuous and progressive.
I printed out and will read his whole post later. For now, quoting a novelist and playwright’s opinion piece, does not back up “define broad appeal”. If you meant that it appeals to a majority of right wingers, then I could believe that, but again would need data (not an opinion) to back that up. And that also goes for my opinion.
“this movement is the only fuel the more extreme right has to work with” Immigration is the fuel the right works with, and not just in America. Guess what climate change is going to do to that?
Seriously? Please tell me that’s sarcasm.
Racism, especially against immigrants has broad appeal, because people have been convinced by decades of right wing propaganda that they’re the enemy, rather than the oligarchy–the real cause of all their suffering. Did you learn nothing from Occupy?
Automation has killed 100,000 coal mining jobs & replaced them with phenomenally destructive strip mining and mountaintop “removal”. But the right’s imaginary liberal war on coal has been blamed. Their blaming of everything on a bizarre conflation of real, mostly right-of-center neo-liberals, and all those radical communists in the US, other races (climate populationism) and women, also in coded language so far, and tools of Satan like wind turbines, is evasion of their responsibility for all the damage they’ve caused, are causing, and want to cause.
So to see you blame progressives’ for the right’s closing down of society with restrictions on thought and the right to speak in the places it matters most is…puzzling at best. That’s the kind of self-blame and surrender that makes it easy for people to abuse their spouses and children; for the whole range of racist, misogynist, anti-intellectual, anti-sex policies, actions, and institutions, from coded insults to slavery, to destroy truth; and for fascists to take over countries and hijack reality. Maybe reading Naomi Wolf’s The End of America would help.
There is no extreme left in the US. Conservative frames with “broad appeal” are any messages the far right has hammered into people over decades by relentless repetition; ideas like the existence of the shadowy far left, which is actually just people who accept science on things the far right doesn’t like—climate change, evolution, Covid.
Very good point, Ubrew12.