Jul. 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, who will soon begin working toward their goal of protecting conservative ideals on campus.
The Senate vote was along party lines with Democrats dissenting, critical of the initiative.
The new Academic Council’s first task will be to hire a director for Wright State’s Civics, Culture and Workforce center, according to state Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland. Cirino is a driving advocate behind the state’s recent actions to set up five institutes throughout 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 council’s) main task, and they can certainly have some ongoing responsibilities relative to monitoring how the program is going, the director can report back on progress and that sort of thing,” Cirino said. “But it’s not going to be a terrible amount of work for these board members on an ongoing basis.”
Per state law, council members were nominated by the WSU board of trustees on June 14 before going to the Senate for approval.
They are Wright State’s Executive Vice President & Chief Operation Officer Greg Sample; Chair of the School of Social Science and International Studies Laura Luehrmann; Vice President of Finance, Planning and Analysis Burhan Kawosa; Rick Schwartz, chairman of Winsupply; retired Lt. Gen. Tom Owen of ZaiStar Consulting; and Mark Ridenour, the incoming chair of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.
Cirino told this news organization that he and the Senate Higher Education Committee that he chairs were looking for nominees that could counter-balance the biases he asserts are already on public university campuses.
“We’re looking for balance,” said Cirino. “Most of the instruction, particularly the social sciences, on campuses today is way left-of-center, and there’s an under representation of what I would call neutral or conservative approaches to teaching government and history and so on. That was our overall intent in setting up these centers.”
Cirino said the individual nominees’ political preferences weren’t major factors in their consideration.
Once Wright State’s civics center is up and running with a director, it be tasked with designing courses on five areas of study, in accordance with new state law. Those topics include: the foundations of free societies; the American Constitutional order, which includes the United States armed forces; responsible and informed citizenship; the purpose and role of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base; and the workforce needs of the base.
Cirino expects the classes to be elective and available to a wide array of majors, though the specifics are not spelled out in Ohio Revised Code.
Democrats have long questioned the need for state-mandated centers focused on percolating free speech, but have also voted against specific nominees for personal reasons.
“For Wright State, we didn’t have any problems with any of them specifically, but it was just standing with our opposition to these centers and how unnecessary they are,” said Casey Rife, communications director for the Senate Democrats.
Cirino told this news organization that the center needs to have a seventh member approved after an unnamed sitting judge dropped out of contention shortly before the Senate took its vote.
Wright State’s nominees were the fourth of five panels to be approved by the Senate. The academic counsels of the civic centers at Ohio State University, University of Toledo, Cleveland State University have already been settled, which leaves Miami University as the lone institution yet to confirm such a council.
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