The Battle of Ohio
On the evening of November 8, 2011, Ohio Gov. John Kasich stepped before microphones to admit that the centerpiece legislation of his administration, Senate Bill 5, had been heavily defeated in a referendum by the people of his state.
“When you get beat,” an at least temporarily chastened Kasich said, “you’ve got to admit it. It is clear the people have spoken.”1
On Election Day 2011, with voter turnout unusually high for an off-year ballot, Ohio voters defeated Senate Bill 5, or Issue 2, as it was known on the ballot, by a margin of nearly 62 percent to 38 percent (2.2 million votes to 1.3 million).
Senate Bill 5, or SB 5, launched with great fanfare by its right-wing Republican Party supporters early in the year, had been decisively defeated by Ohioans—Democrats, those increasingly rare moderate Republicans, and independents—who didn’t believe in scapegoating public employees for the recession or the state’s budgetary woes.
For me, a university professor and union member, as for so many others, this fight had become very personal. It said a great deal about two different views of Ohio and two different views of America. On the one hand, the proponents of SB 5 suggested that the world was one where, if only individuals would offer themselves up to the benevolent corporate forces of the free market and conservative political officials, then the state’s budget and economic problems would be solved. Backed by corporate titans, conservative think tanks, and right-wing politicians, supporters of SB 5 promised they were only trying to do what was necessary and best for Ohio. In reality, they represented an ideology that, despite borrowing from some of the worst strands of American history, is actually quite foreign to American traditions.
The United States had never been a place, until recently, where any significant portion of the population believed that submission of individual freedom to corporate power was a necessity.
On the other hand, like many others, my life experience had suggested a very different world. In my world, ordinary people needed some protection from the rapacious corporate and political forces that saw their labor as only another commodity to buy and sell. Empowered by shared interests and goals, people could craft lives that were both successful and satisfying. There was no need to sacrifice individual freedom to market forces. More than that, my experience had shown to me how essential it is that the people who actually do the work and produce value also have a say in the workplace.
For me, part of this view was generated by growing up in a small town in the Rocky Mountain West. Anaconda, Montana, was created and dominated by a huge multinational mining corporation, the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. The fabulously rich copper mines in nearby Butte, and the rumbling of the world’s largest copper smelter in Anaconda, kept generations employed while creating a unique urban industrial world in the agrarian vastness of Montana. Meanwhile, the famous Copper Kings used their enormous fortunes to play with the state’s political system like a toy. The opportunity for real political freedom for Montanans came only in 1912, when by public referendum the people passed the Montana Corrupt Practices Act, which barred corporate contributions to political campaigns, one of the toughest such laws in the nation. Without the powerful unions that had developed to provide some balance and protection, the mighty Anaconda Company would have left nothing behind when it was done depleting the area’s resources. These were truths learned in Montana through hard experience. The Montana Corrupt Practices Act has now been undermined by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United case, making unconstitutional any reasonable limits on corporate ability to buy elections. To paraphrase a New Yorker article on this situation, conservatives have proven to be peculiarly indifferent to the hard-learned lessons of history.2
A further aspect of my background that informs my understanding of the SB 5 battle is my decade-long career as a newspaper reporter and editor in Montana and Idaho, including eight years at The Montana Standard in Butte, before I chose to return to academia. My work in newspapers made me keenly aware of economic issues, the motivations of elected officials, and the need for openness in government. It also highlighted the value of a free and accurate press, as well as the dangers of allowing corporate interests too much control over public money and public policy.
In 2011, as a professor at the university, this need to provide some balance and protection was met by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a faculty union at the University of Cincinnati (UC). Certainly, the AAUP is not the kind of industrial union that I had been familiar with in my youth. But with the increasing corporatization of higher education in Ohio and elsewhere in the country, where many university presidents see themselves as CEOs and administrations tend to behave like property management firms, the AAUP has been a valued voice for students, the classroom, and the faculty. I happened to be president of the AAUP at UC in 2011.
Founded in 1915 by John Dewey, a philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, and Arthur Lovejoy, a philosopher and historian, the AAUP’s original and longstanding objective is to protect faculty from unwarranted intimidation or removal from their positions because of holding unpopular views. This conception of “academic freedom” is essential to the life of higher education and was introduced into academia by the AAUP. In addition to promoting academic freedom, the AAUP also has strongly endorsed the practice of shared governance at colleges and universities. “Shared governance” means that on issues affecting the operation of their institutions, especially on education, curriculum, hiring, reappointment, and tenure, the faculty should have an important role in contributing to decisions. The AAUP’s “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure” is the definitive articulation of these principles and practices; it is widely accepted throughout the academic community and known as the “Red Book.” In Ohio, the AAUP has a dozen collective bargaining chapters and 11 advocacy chapters, and it represents more than 6,000 faculty members in bargaining units across the state.
The University of Cincinnati has historic roots in the city dating back to 1819. With more than 42,000 students, UC is second in size only to Ohio State University, the behemoth in Columbus.3 Combining a large and complex research-intensive institution with open-access regional campuses, UC can provide students with the kind of opportunities that change lives.
The UC Chapter of the AAUP, which was founded in 1933 but negotiated its first contract in 1975, is the oldest and largest chapter in Ohio. In nearly 40 years of collective bargaining, it has only resorted to a strike twice and has been successful in defending faculty rights, shared governance, and academic freedom. Despite the stormy periods, most of the time a sense of partnership in a joint endeavor of building a great university informs the AAUP’s relationship with the UC administration. Unlike many traditional labor unions, AAUP chapters operate independently of the national office in Washington and the state office in Columbus. It is a grassroots professional organization.
Over the decades, the AAUP—including both its collective bargaining and advocacy chapters in Ohio—had remained studiously nonpolitical. This is especially true of our chapter in Cincinnati. Given UC’s size and complexity, and with more than 1,700 full-time faculty members in the bargaining unit, the chapter had chosen to avoid the controversy that might have come with routine political partisanship. John Kasich, however, by his campaign promises, worked just as hard to change our stance. Over the course of the campaign for governor in 2010, we gradually became aware that Kasich had in mind a sweeping attack on public education and that we in the state’s colleges and universities would be targeted as well. Professor Steve Howe, chair of the Psychology Department and then president of the chapter, began to bring these issues to our attention during the summer of 2010, and by September we were ready to break new ground in trying to defend our faculty and the university from this anticipated broad-based attack.
First, our executive council considered, with great gravity, the choice to make our first-ever political campaign donation. Democratic Gov. Ted Strickland had introduced a series of innovative strategies for higher education and had used some federal stimulus funds to help protect education in Ohio from severe cutbacks. He had emphasized the importance of higher education in Ohio in building an economy of the future. Many of the state’s budget problems, as will be explained later in this book, were not because of the economic downturn but because of ideologically driven tax cuts that drastically reduced state revenue. Candidate Kasich was evidently going to use the manufactured crisis to attack all of the public unions in Ohio, including the AAUP. Certainly, the next step would be to attack the private unions. Over the decades, the AAUP had created a positive environment at UC, where faculty had respect and influence over the quality of education our students received. Now we were looking at losing all of that. In the face of this crisis, we chose to make a major contribution to the Strickland campaign—the UC chapter of AAUP’s first-ever political contribution.
Second, President Howe and I, as vice president at the time, wrote a letter dated October 1, 2010, that was mailed to the homes of our faculty members, outlining why it was of paramount importance that we do what we could to see that Strickland was reelected. The difference between the two candidates, we wrote, was “so stark” and the “implications for higher education and collective bargaining rights” so great that we needed to take a stand. “John Kasich,” we wrote, “has publicly expressed on numerous occasions, his belief that professors and Ohio’s public universities are obstacles to a better future for Ohio, not assets. Mr. Kasich has also repeatedly stated that Ohio’s public employees, and collective bargaining rights currently held by public employees, are ‘the problem’ in Ohio.” We went on to cite statements made by Kasich during the campaign, such as “We need to break the back of organized labor in the schools.”
“We believe,” we wrote in conclusion, “that we will be far better off in these tough times with a governor in Columbus who believes public universities and colleges are an asset to Ohio and the basis for a better future, rather than a governor who sees them—and us—as either an obstacle or irrelevant.” We then encouraged the faculty to review the enclosed flyers that listed the opposing positions on educational issues and asked our faculty to make up their own minds and be sure to vote.
This may have all been too little too late, and certainly many public and private unions, as well as many ordinary Ohioans, did not anticipate the ruthlessness of the attack that did come and thus did not mobilize in time to keep Gov. Strickland in office, where he could have served as a firewall against radical and destructive policies. Kasich won the election by the narrowest of margins, with 49 percent of the vote to Strickland’s 47 percent; a mere 77,000 votes out of 3.6 million cast separated the two candidates.4
When Senate Bill 5 was rapidly signed into law by Gov. Kasich just a few months later, it contained language that singled out university faculty unions for virtual elimination, alone out of all the other public unions in Ohio. At that point, we knew that our effort to avoid a Kasich governorship, and to defend our university and higher education in Ohio, had been the correct course of action.
Over the next several months, a titanic political struggle ensued, pitting a formerly moribund labor movement in a rust-belt state against right-wing extremists who wanted to remake the state in their own corporate-friendly image. In the process, a historic labor coalition brought together professors, teamsters, secretaries, food service workers, police officers, schoolteachers, firemen, nurses, and janitors to fight for the continuation of the middle class in Ohio and to help the state continue to be the place of opportunity it has always strived to be.
This book is one story of that battle for Ohio—and perhaps for the soul of America.