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SSCC faculty rejects Senate Bill 5 in letter to Ohio lawmakers

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To the editor:

The undersigned faculty at Southern State Community College request, as a letter to the editor, that you print the open letter below to the state representatives over SSCC’s service district of Adams, Brown, Clinton, Fayette and Highland counties. 

(This is an) open letter to State Representatives Bubp, Johnson, Peterson and Rosenberger:

We are faculty at Southern State Community College, which has served thousands of citizens in your districts very well for 36 years. We want you and the citizens you serve to be aware that Senate Bill 5 is rife with unintended consequences that will harm the quality of higher education in Ohio. We only have space to discuss a few here.

In particular, SB 5 will likely force every college faculty member who participates in managerial decisions out of their faculty union. This will grow salaries since such faculty will demand more pay to become part of the higher paid administrative staff.  Worse, it will destroy the healthy balance of shared governance enjoyed in all colleges and universities of quality. 

Fewer and fewer senior college administrators these days have served as or qualify to be full-time professors. Removing faculty from participating in the governance of their college is a little like putting accountants in charge of hospitals. And since shared governance is expected by accreditation agencies, there is a risk that some Ohio colleges could be in trouble getting their accreditations renewed if faculty are excluded from many decisions.

Free speech protection for faculty is a centuries old tradition in academia. SB 5 removes such protections for innovative and outspoken faculty. It is a terrible step backwards when the most highly educated professionals will not be free to speak openly and challenge policies that harm the quality of education or their students’ best interests.

Our faculty are actually paid less than teachers at some public schools in our area when you compare base salary schedules. This is because, historically, there has been less money to go around the higher education system than the public schools. The fact that many SSCC faculty appear to earn more is due to the fact that so many of us are working long hours and summers and assuming extra administrative duties in order to serve the large increase in students during the past two years. 

Please don’t underestimate that many of us could be earning more in the private sector, but we chose this profession out of a passion to help our fellow adults reach their potential. SB 5 will go a long way towards discouraging the best from joining this profession, and indeed, it will cease to be the profession to which we devote our passion and more like just a job when a centralized state government imposes its will on and micromanages a higher ed system that is not broken.

SB 5 targets those state employees who are doing the most to improve the future of Ohio adult citizens: its college and university faculty. We recommend that most or all provisions affecting the University System of Ohio be stripped from SB 5 and debated in a separate, more focused bill before serious harm is done to the fine colleges of Ohio and your very own Southern State Community College.

   Sincerely,

        Jon Davidson                       Jody Gray                       Louis E. Mays  
        Rainee Angles                      Kristi Hall                       Randall Massie  
        Julia Basham                       Larry Hartsock                Ken Shull  
        Linda Chamblin                    Bill Henry                       Brian Siemers  
        Jamie Compton                    David Hoffman                Becky Storer  
        Rhonda J. Davis                   Ken Holliday                   Don Storer  
        Denise Decker-Flum             Marilyn Jones                  Tom Stroup  
        Jeff Foster                           Michele Kegley                Brenda Tilton  
        Melissa Gillespie                  Cathy LaParl                    Jeffrey Wallace  
        Charles Gorman                  Gayle Mackay                  James Werline[[In-content Ad]]

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