8
War on Many Fronts
It is not possible to really explain the crisis we faced in 2011 without noting that it was coming on multiple fronts. In addition to union busting, the conservatives in the legislature launched destructive initiatives in two other areas: voting rights and privatization of higher education. Not surprisingly, they were helped in these efforts by ALEC, the conservative legislative bill mill.1
One strategy introduced was to turn Ohio’s universities into “charter” institutions by weakening their bonds to state oversight and state funding, in return for more autonomy. Throughout the struggle on this issue, we were baffled as to why—given the demonstrated failure of charter schools in elementary and secondary education—lawmakers would want to undermine our public universities as well.
The first word that we had about charter universities came to us with a thunderclap in an excellent piece in The Cincinnati Enquirer on February 24, 2011. “Ohio Gov. John Kasich is promoting a plan for ‘charter universities’ that would exempt colleges from multiple state regulations as long as they meet certain conditions, while continuing to receive taxpayer money,” the Enquirer reported. The newspaper had talked to David Creamer, vice president for finance and business services at Miami University, who told them that Kasich had not yet formally proposed the restructuring plan. But he said that relief from regulatory burdens would help colleges control costs. “In trying to make sure things don’t get mishandled, we create a lot of red tape,” he said. “That’s a decision every institution would have to make, whether the tradeoffs are worth it.”2
But the best part came from a letter, obtained by the Enquirer, that UC President Gregory Williams had written to Kasich. In the letter to Kasich, Williams listed several other areas where “charter universities” could be relieved of administrative burdens, including civil service, purchasing, state budget regulations, and “collective bargaining.” Williams also asked Kasich to consider further reforms, including allowing universities to self-insure or purchase their own workers’ compensation insurance; allowing universities to directly acquire land through eminent domain; limiting required responses to public records requests; and reducing reports to the Board of Regents.
To be fair to Williams, we subsequently learned that these were not exactly his personal requests. But perhaps even worse was that all of the state’s university presidents, acting together through the Inter-University Council and its Kasich-appointed director Bruce Johnson, had put together this laundry list of issues, including their desire to undermine their faculty unions. The letter was evidence that Williams was, to a great extent, joining with the other presidents on the Inter-University Council in this attack on the faculty.
Each of these issues individually is controversial and bad policy. The desire, for example, to allow universities to refuse to respond to public record requests creates pockets of secrecy where corruption can thrive. Although university presidents tend to buy into the mythology that they are CEOs of corporate entities, they are not. They are managers of public institutions, and thus their records and operations are and should remain a matter of public record. Similarly, too many university presidents become focused on being real estate managers or behaving like the owners or managers of semi-pro athletic teams, and spend a disproportionate time away from the central and most important reason for the university’s existence—its instructional and research mission.
But that Williams, in a private letter to the state’s right-wing governor, would suggest that he wanted relief from his collective bargaining obligations came as a blow to the faculty at UC. We struggled with this issue in the months ahead. Knowing the likelihood that Kasich would punish any president and university who did not support his initiatives, some faculty members were willing to give Williams a pass on this letter. This position has some added legitimacy, given the fact that Williams subsequently issued a couple of heavily nuanced letters trying to soften his position in the weeks afterward, including one to the Faculty Senate cabinet.
The popular Ohio political blog Plunderbund seemed to echo faculty sentiments in a commentary headlined, “Because Charter Schools Worked Out So Well, Kasich Says, ‘Let’s Try Charter Universities.’” Plunderbund went on to opine, “Yep, yet another group that Kasich is thinking he needs to give them ‘flexibility’ from public accountability regulations because of the massive cuts Kasich is planning to make. Yep, austere times [are] precisely when we should get rid of our fiscal safeguards, right folks.”3
Triggering the push for charter universities was the selection of Jim Petro, a former Republican attorney general, as chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents. Charter universities “need to be examined carefully,” Petro told the Akron Beacon Journal on March 2, 2011. He told the newspaper that he was not certain exactly what such an institution would look like, but “we have to look at best practices, what has worked elsewhere, how we can redesign it.”
University of Akron President Luis Proenza was enthusiastic about the possibilities, the newspaper reported, adding that the state’s controlling board had stopped Proenza’s plans to buy two properties for future development in February 2011 on the grounds that money was tight. That kind of rebuff could be a thing of the past, the newspaper noted—but the report did not observe that perhaps the university ought to stick to the business of providing an affordable and quality education rather than operating like a property development company. “I would find it extremely valuable from a number of perspectives,” Proenza said. “Many regulations add 10 to 20 percent to the cost of doing business. Program approvals sometimes take months or a year or more. Sign me up.”4
At Kent State, the Beacon Journal reported, President Lester Lefton seemed cautiously optimistic about whether charter universities could work in Ohio’s second-largest campus system. KSU “is supportive of the notion of charter status to universities that meet certain criteria or make progress toward accountability, accessibility and financial stability,” Lefton said in an email. The “freedom from many state regulatory ordinances” would allow KSU to operate more efficiently, the newspaper reported. The paper also observed that in 2010 then-Chancellor Fingerhut had rejected KSU’s plan to raise student fees to fund $250 million in renovations to the Kent campus. In theory, “that obstacle would be history if KSU had more autonomy.”5
Petro was fond of implying that wonderful things would happen if government just got out of the way of public universities. Petro, who first raised the idea of creating charter universities in 2005, confessed to The Columbus Dispatch that, while not knowing yet what such a school would be like, he was certain something needed to be done so that Ohio’s state schools could cut costs and spend money more efficiently. “If we free our schools from these constraints, we can build the reputation of our system, increase access to Ohioans and begin to draw the best and brightest students from across the country,” Petro told the Dispatch, repeating the frequent conservative error of overestimating cost savings produced by deregulation.6
The canard of “flexibility” was effectively destroyed by Sara Kilpatrick in a powerful column in The Columbus Dispatch on March 12, 2011. “This is not an accurate portrayal of the potentially dramatic and dangerous turn the charter university idea would be for Ohio’s citizens,” Kilpatrick wrote. “Rather, it would be another taxpayer-funded privatization scheme that will ultimately hurt Ohio’s students and future economic growth.” For generations, Kilpatrick argued, Ohio’s taxpayers and elected officials have made a commitment to providing a high-quality, affordable, and accessible public-college education to the next generation. “In fact,” Kilpatrick observed, “our current governor and at least 82 out of the 132 members of the 129th General Assembly have enjoyed the benefits of an Ohio public-university education.” But now, “under the pretext of the state’s current fiscal crisis, flexibility and a private-sector-knows-best attitude, Republican leadership wants to abandon this commitment and dismantle Ohio’s public university system,” Kilpatrick observed.7
Kilpatrick went on to note that Virginia Tech had recently become a charter university in that state and had seen tuition rise 24 percent in one year. But Kilpatrick said that the problem was greater than the harsh impact on students—though that was very serious. It would also mean a lack of accountability and oversight. “Taxpayer dollars would be spent, yet taxpayers would have no means of holding these institutions accountable,” Kilpatrick wrote, since the universities could easily conceal their operations. “Our public colleges would become for-profit business instruments rather than a public investment in all Ohioans’ educational attainment and prosperity.”8
Further, she noted, given the revelations in Cincinnati and elsewhere, “charter universities would serve as another union-busting tool against unionized faculty and staff on campuses. This will mean far fewer people will have the ability to speak up if they see corruption or theft of taxpayer money.” The real problem, she observed, with Ohio’s public university system was not collective bargaining or a lack of flexibility—it was that “too much money is spent on unnecessary administration. Even conservative think tanks like the Goldwater Institute have found that ‘administrative bloat’ is the largest factor behind rising tuition costs and waste in higher education.” Kilpatrick concluded that “Kasich, Petro, Johnson and our university presidents cannot successfully provide solutions when they keep misidentifying the problems. Ultimately, Ohio’s students will suffer from these misguided policies.”
Gov. Kasich didn’t waste much time in presenting his radical budget. A bizarre aspect to the announced budget was the way that Kasich intended to take the presentation of the budget out of the hands of journalists. Rather than announcing the budget at a press conference and answering questions, “Kasich is spending about $5,000 to rent the 900-seat [Capitol Theater] for an ‘Ohio Town-Hall Meeting’ tonight and broadcasting on satellite television and the Web,” Bloomberg news reported. Asked in an interview the week before why he had decided to announce the budget in the theater, Kasich replied, “I thought it was a cool idea. We want to explain it all to people.”9
Kasich’s budget was a complex package of gifts to the governor’s political allies. Every pet Republican project was represented in some way. Inaccurately called by Kasich “The Jobs Budget,” the budget in fact promised to undermine employment in the state by eliminating public sector jobs and the service infrastructure that support private sector employment. The budget proposed to sell five state prisons, privatize the Ohio Turnpike, eliminate seniority for teachers, and slash local government funding by 49 percent. For local schools, K–12 funding would be cut 11.5 percent in 2012 and another 4.9 percent in 2013, but Kasich would also expand the opportunities for vouchers that would further undermine low-income schools. For higher education, Kasich proposed at least a 10.5 percent cut in 2012. And for faculty in the State Teachers Retirement System, a 4 percent increase in the employee’s contribution was planned.10
“This budget is woven with one reform after another. It is, I would guess, the most reform-oriented budget in modern Ohio history,” Kasich said, using “reform” where the words “cut” or “elimination” should more accurately be used. The budget immediately had many critics: “This is a shell game which will bring upon local governments and towns the most devastating tax increases or job cuts that they’ve ever faced. It’s an assault on teachers, police, firefighters, librarians and even your local school cafeteria worker,” said Brian Rothenberg of Progress Ohio, a left-leaning organization.11
Buried deep in the budget was language addressing the creation of charter universities:
The Chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents will submit a report to the General Assembly and the governor containing findings and recommendations for developing the appropriate policy, administrative rule and statutory changes necessary to implement a charter university program. The plan will define the manner in which an institution of higher learning can receive increased freedom from state regulations in return for less dependency on state financial subsidies. Universities’ eligibility will be determined by certain performance measures determined by the chancellor.12
In their analysis of the situation, the Ohio Conference AAUP communications committee of Marty Kich, Dave Witt, and Steve Aby observed that the specifics of what the concept of a “charter university” meant were absent from the budget bill. Instead, the budget legislation empowered Chancellor Jim Petro to define it, and then submit it to the legislature for final enabling legislation. However, Governor Kasich and Inter-University Council President Bruce Johnson had already suggested that many items could be connected to “charter universities.” These possibilities included limiting or completely eliminating collective bargaining rights for some or all campus employee groups; little or no oversight by the board of regents with regard to local administration decisions; and allowing university administrations to avoid compliance with Ohio’s open records laws. It would be our job to continue to monitor the plans for charter universities as they unfolded.13
On March 22, Jim Petro, as the newly nominated Ohio chancellor of the Board of Regents, testified before the House Financial and Appropriations Committee. For someone who had advocated for charter universities for years, he was remarkably non forthcoming during the testimony, which suggested to faculty members across Ohio that perhaps the plans were still being put together and that we still had an opportunity to influence them. “I really don’t know” was a common Petro response to questioning. We joked that we could probably make this into a tagline in our campaign against the privatization of our universities. “They really don’t know what they are doing” would be one version.
We were impressed by some of the representatives’ questions, which revealed that legislators had been reading the letters faculty across the state had been publishing in newspapers and had paid attention to testimony that Sara Kilpatrick had given on the charter concept as well as to a publication we had circulated, entitled “Looking for Savings in All the Wrong Places.” Rep. Denise Driehaus (D-Cincinnati) particularly pressed Petro about the role of the faculty in the planning for charter universities. Was he meeting with faculty? Petro avoided answering the question for quite a while but eventually said he would be willing to sit down with a group of faculty and talk about the concept. Of course, he never actually arranged to do this.
In a discussion on April 4, faculty members gathered a better idea of what the process would be for creating “charter” universities. We feared that somehow Kasich would insist that the charter legislation would be wedged into the budget bill or simply imposed through some administrative process, since our presidents unfortunately seemed in favor. But it became clear in a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education that legislation would be required. Subcommittee Chair Randy Gardner (R-Bowling Green) noted that the budget bill required Chancellor Petro to announce the plan by Aug. 15 and that the legislature should implement it on July 1. Gardner asked whether the chancellor had authority to implement it or whether the legislature would need to pass legislation. “I believe it is intended,” Petro said, “and it would be my intent, to come back to the General Assembly for adoption of legislation that would specifically create the category of ‘charter university.’” Petro also noted that they were now calling it a plan for “entrepreneurial universities”—obviously an effort to escape the negative connotation of the widespread failure of charter schools.14
On April 7, Sara Kilpatrick was able to testify for the AAUP before the House Finance Subcommittee on Higher Education. After explaining the prominent and historic role of the AAUP in higher education, she went on to describe the charter university proposal in the budget bill. “Proponents of charter universities describe the idea as a simple one,” she said. Public universities would receive less money in state subsidies in return for less state government regulation. This “flexibility” would then supposedly lead to cures for all of higher education’s ills. “Beyond this vague description,” she said, “different parties continue to describe the concept of charter universities in different ways—so at this point, the legislature is being asked to endorse a general concept without knowing exactly what it means.”
Kilpatrick continued her testimony: “If we look at past comments on what ‘charter university’ means,” it becomes clear that “the idea would undermine the whole concept of public universities—and instead make them semi-private institutions that still take taxpayer monies, but have little or no accountability to the public.” Such a drastic change would ultimately hurt Ohio’s students and undermine future economic growth, she said.
Kilpatrick argued that for generations Ohioans have made significant investments in the state’s public universities. “Now,” she said, “under the pretext of the state’s current revenue crisis and the purported need for ‘flexibility,’ the governor is proposing that we all abandon this commitment and, in quite real terms, begin the process of dismantling Ohio’s public university system.”
She argued that it is possible to look around the country for evidence of the damage that a move to such privatization has done. In Virginia, for example, she noted Virginia Commonwealth University’s sharp increases and that the University of Virginia had increased its tuition by 50.5 percent over the last five years.
In Ohio, Kilpatrick argued, the charter university strategy “would make it even more difficult than it has already become for the average Ohio family to send their children to college.” Students would either choose not to attend college or would graduate with a huge amount of debt—both of which would equate to less spending potential in Ohio’s future. Further, the high cost would serve as a bar to adults who wish to return to college to upgrade their skills and compete in new industries.
Kilpatrick went on to comment on another element extolled by the “charter university” proponents—the abandonment of open records rules and much of the reporting required to bodies such as the Ohio Board of Regents. “This inevitably means a lack of accountability and oversight,” Kilpatrick noted. Taxpayer dollars would be spent, yet taxpayers would have no means of holding these institutions accountable, because citizens and the news media would have no means by which to shed light on decisions about how taxpayer money would be spent—and who was really making those decisions and benefiting from them. “Cronyism, favoritism, nepotism, and in some cases even corruption,” Kilpatrick said, “all are likely to creep back into our university system when no one has the right to ask questions and examine documents.” The call from charter proponents to not have to do competitive bidding for construction projects could generate many of the same problems, she said.
Kilpatrick said that various press organizations had reported that proponents of “charter universities” also clearly see them as union-free zones. She acknowledged that was at least consistent with charter university strategy to prevent any questioning of their decisions, since unions are often among the most vocal on-campus critics of administrative financial decisions and priorities. “Without unions and without open records law requirements, who will be left to safeguard the taxpayers’ money?” Kilpatrick asked.
Kilpatrick also noted that since there is a national market for university professors—perhaps the most mobile members of the American workforce—this continual attack on faculty collective bargaining might mean Ohio would lose some of its best and brightest professors. “AAUP contracts have been, for decades,” Kilpatrick said, “one of the only mechanisms by which faculty can fight to ensure that salaries and benefits keep pace with national markets.” Without the contracts, it would be all too easy for “administrations to continue to redirect funds toward ever-expanding administration apparatus and administrator salaries,” she said, and as a result, “we will not be giving our students the best education possible.”
“The real problem with Ohio’s public university system,” Kilpatrick emphasized, “is not a lack of flexibility or collective bargaining” but that “it is woefully underfunded by the state.” And of the funds the system receives, “too much money is spent on unnecessary administration.” Kilpatrick said in conclusion, “The charter university idea is at best a Pandora’s Box that the legislature is being asked to endorse, with details to come later. At worst, it is the first step toward semi-privatization of one of Ohio’s most precious public assets and a betrayal of this generation’s access to an affordable college education—something that previous generations were able to count on.”
The AAUP expected legislation to be proposed rapidly on the charter university idea. Being bad and destructive policy had not stopped Senate Bill 5 from being quickly adopted, but this time it appeared that a number of stakeholders—namely the university presidents—were uncertain about the ramifications of the plan. As a result, public discussion of the concept declined sharply. But we could not sit back thinking that saner heads would prevail. It was necessary for us to keep pounding home to the public what the privatization of their university system would mean to them.
“The problem with all this optimism about deregulation and freeing the creativity of charter universities,” I wrote in a column that appeared in the Hamilton Journal-News, “is that the legislature is being asked to sign off on a Trojan horse right now, as part of the budget bill, without any concrete explanation as to what these charter universities would mean for Ohio or its citizens.”15 I expressed great concern that the proponents of the concept were asking us to hold off on criticism until they introduced the plan, which they expected to do in mid-August. But then they wanted to pass legislation rapidly so that the new concept could be actually implemented in July 2012.
“Exactly when is a public debate supposed to take place?” I asked. “We have to make our voices heard now,” I insisted, “not wait until the end of the summer when the legislature will likely be trying to railroad through a proposal.” I was particularly critical of the way the Republican legislature seemed determined to impose this radical legislation without consulting with faculty or students about the dramatic change.
I recounted some of what we knew about charter experiments in other states. It was not comforting. In Virginia, the often-touted example of charter success, the University of Virginia had just announced an 8.9 percent tuition hike, this after increases of more than 50 percent already imposed since 2006. The College of William and Mary was not far behind, having announced a 7.7 percent hike in 2011.
In the state of Washington, where Gov. Christine Gregoire had been touting a similar charter university model, I warned that the universities might be seeking as much as a 16 percent hike in each of the next two years. In Texas, tuition has increased by an astonishing 63 percent since the state universities were deregulated in 2003. The Texas legislature has been so alarmed at the trend that it is trying to re-regulate the state universities to rein in these runaway tuition increases.16
The problem extends beyond just high tuition for the state’s residents, I explained. Universities have begun to pursue the more lucrative out-of-state residents who pay a much higher cost for their education without claim on the state subsidy. Out-of-state students and foreign students must pay much more for tuition, and so places that might have been reserved for in-state residents are increasingly reserved for those who come from outside the home state. “Abandoned, financially and otherwise, by state legislatures, entrepreneurial universities must inevitably chase cash that out-of-state students bring,” I wrote, but meanwhile “soaring tuition costs create an ever-increasing obstacle to the state’s own residents who wish to attend their so-called state ‘public’ university.”
One of the principles that the AAUP most enthusiastically supports is the idea of shared governance. There was a fine example of shared governance at its best at the University of Cincinnati during the struggle over the charter university model. Faculty Senate Chair Dr. Richard Harknett, associate professor of political science, in collaboration with the Faculty Senate Cabinet created a committee, chaired by Dr. Frank Wray, a professor of biology, to examine the implications of the charter university concept. The committee was called the DAIR Committee, short for Deregulation, Autonomy, and Internal Restructuring. I must emphasize the independence of this faculty investigation. Dr. Harknett worked diligently to isolate the task force from influence either from the AAUP or from the administration, although both were encouraged to provide the task force with information. Like the administration, AAUP representatives provided a good deal of documentation to the task force, but its independence was jealously guarded.
Naturally, I was somewhat concerned about this process. My AAUP colleagues and I had examined the charter university concept thoroughly and were certain it would have a damaging impact on our institution. But I was well aware of the possibility that another given group of professors might come to a different or more complicated conclusion. Then we would be in the difficult situation of being on different sides of the issue, and it was hard to understand how that could contribute to a positive outcome. In the end, we just had to be confident that a group of intelligent people looking at the same evidence with the best interests of the university at stake would come to the same conclusion that we had.
One of the most valuable initiatives that we launched was in collaboration with students at UC. Because the huge hikes in tuition connected to the charter concept are likely to punish students and their families above all, we developed a series of videos that circulated widely on YouTube. Staff member Eric Palmer worked on the videos featuring UC students. Common themes were the importance of their university education, their attachment to UC, and their desire not to be driven away from college by exploding tuition costs. One particularly effective video had the theme of musical chairs: as the state continually cuts funding and hikes tuition, some students would be left without seats.17
We were contacted by students at Miami University who, like students all over the state, were doing what they could to preserve their university as a truly public institution. The Miami students had a meeting with their university president, David C. Hodge, to address their concerns about the charter concept. They wanted someone from the AAUP to be with them. Their experience was not unlike those of other students trying to generate a dialogue with their administrations. Too often, administrators talk down to students and suggest they do not know what they are talking about. To prevent this, the Miami students wanted someone from AAUP to back them up. I happily agreed to join them. It is worth noting that the faculty members at Miami are not unionized. Shared governance is undermined by a University Senate made up of administrators, staff, and faculty, a situation that effectively muffles and dilutes the voice of the faculty. So it is no surprise that the students looked to the AAUP for assistance.18
Over about a three-month period, I twice went with the Miami students to visit President Hodge. They were positive and productive meetings. The first meeting was a bit tense, the second more comfortable. The presence of an AAUP president did raise some eyebrows on my first visit. But on both occasions the students were clear and assertive in arguing that they feared damage would be done by converting to a charter university. The real difference in the two meetings was that the university presidents had actually seen the charter plan by the second visit. Most of the presidents became less enthusiastic when they realized how much money they would lose from the state and how little they would gain from so-called “flexibility.”
Finally, in August, Chancellor Petro came out with the report on what he now preferred to call the “entrepreneurial” university concept. Although the plan was introduced with fanfare, there were also voices of concern. The universities favored relief from bureaucratic government mandates, said Bruce Johnson of the Inter-University Council, “but we think the state needs to invest more, not less, in higher education.” He speculated that easing of regulations could create savings but asserted that the money should then be plowed back into the university system and not spent elsewhere.19
As proposed, the plan included all the issues that we had been concerned about. Boards of Trustees would be able to have secret meetings with internal auditors behind closed doors, buy and sell property with less state oversight, and set tuition based on the cost of an academic program. On our state conference website, the Ohio AAUP announced our continued opposition: “Don’t let the names fool you. Regardless of what they are called, charter universities undermine the whole concept of public universities and instead make them semi-private institutions that still take taxpayer monies but have little or no accountability to the public. This is an approach that will ultimately hurt Ohio’s students and future economic growth.”20
There ensued a good deal of silence on the side of state officials. In order to accomplish this major change, some legislator was going to have to step up and sponsor the bill. Given the turmoil already surrounding the Senate Bill 5 fight, the now-lukewarm support of the university presidents, and the widespread criticism of the plan by faculty and students, it appeared that no legislator wanted to touch this hot issue.
In early September, the UC-AAUP leadership began to hear some rumors that the DAIR committee was heading toward the same conclusions we had about the damage possible from the charter idea. But we could not be sure that was the case until the report was formally presented at the All-University Faculty Meeting on September 27. With President Williams and our board of trustees in attendance, DAIR Committee representatives reported their findings. Though couched in diplomatic language, the conclusions were clear:
To summarize, the consensus of our committee is that the Enterprise University plan, as currently presented in the Chancellor’s initial report, would not produce a net benefit to UC or its stakeholders. While the committee finds several of the ideas in the report conceptually appealing, including the desire to unburden universities from costly regulations as a means to make the universities more cost efficient, and the effort to enhance the universities’ role in workforce development, the Enterprise University plan, as currently proposed, is unlikely to produce actual savings that could enhance academic programming or affordability for students. In fact, it likely will lead to higher tuition.21
At the AAUP, we, of course, read this with delight. This report became an important tool in the months ahead. The well-researched and well-reasoned 25-page report did more than just dismantle the argument for the charter university concept. Entitled “UC: An Ohio Preeminent 21st Century Public University,” the report also emphasized the strength and value of the University of Cincinnati as a truly public university and worked to present the university’s assets in such a way as to make a strong argument for special attention from the legislature. In the months ahead, Senate Chair Harknett had the opportunity to put the report in the hands of the chancellor and legislators. This was not, after all, a report coming from the faculty union, which would have been easily dismissed by Gov. Kasich and his allies; it was from the representative body of all the faculty at the state’s second-largest university.
In the months ahead, we kept pursuing the argument, but we heard nothing from the advocates of the charter university concept. As of this writing, the idea seems to have been abandoned by the administration while they pursue other objectives. In the spring of 2012, several Ohio newspapers ran stories that the idea was “stalled.” The Cleveland Plain Dealer explained on April 22, 2012, how several issues had sidetracked the attack on the universities represented by the charter concept. First, when initially developed, the proposal had a system of tiers. Naturally, Ohio State was the top tier, given the enormous influence of OSU President Gordon Gee. Other university presidents were unhappy with having OSU, with its size and resources, appear to be driving the concept in a way that would provide it with financial advantages. Further, all the presidents were unhappy with giving up money in return for “freedom,” and thus none of their area legislators would support the legislation.
Finally, many legislators did not want to give up control over tuition increases. Nevertheless, Sloan Spaulding, general counsel for the Board of Regents, told the Plain Dealer that the charter university plan might reappear in a very different form in the future, perhaps in Gov. Kasich’s next budget.22
It would be unfortunate if the charter concept reappears. The concept is no answer to the widespread problem of administrative bloat and diversion of funds away from basic education and research missions. Semi-privatization is not a solution to misplaced priorities. A re-examination of our corporate tax policies and tax policies for the very wealthiest Ohioans in addition to a real jobs creation plan are what are needed from the governor and the legislature. As of this writing, the Ohio legislature is, astoundingly, once again considering another large cut to the income tax that will represent yet another windfall to the wealthy and further cuts to public education. Ohio must establish a reasonable tax policy that requires corporations and individuals who’ve benefited so tremendously from the boom years of the economy to pay their fair share and to help invest in the future so Ohio and the United States can continue to be the places of opportunity they have always been.