Experts in civil discourse and civic engagement discuss new intellectual diversity center coming autumn 2025

Madison Wallace, Garret Travers
Fri, 18 Oct 2024 04:07:18 +0000
Campus, Instagram Page, Local, News, Politics, American civic tradition, American politics, campus, civics, civil discourse, constitutional law, culture, Culture and Society, free speech, government, Institute for American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo, James Madison Program, John Glenn College of Public Affairs, law, Lee Strang, Michael Neblo, ohio general assembly, Ohio Higher Education Reform, ohio politics, ohio state, ohio state university, ohio state university board of trustees, Pranav Jani, Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Senate Bill 117, Senate Bill 83, society [and 2 more]

A part of the Ohio State’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs building may soon be home to the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society — a new intellectual diversity center ?headed by Lee Strang. Credit: Caleb Blake | Lantern File Photo

The Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society — a new intellectual diversity center funded by Ohio Senate Bill 117, which was added to and passed in last year’s state operating budget — has spent the last year establishing its roots on campus.

Senate Bill 117 — proposed by state Sens. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) and Rob McColley (R-Napoleon) — aims to combat the replacement of history with ideology, with specific regard to “leftist bias on campus, through the establishment of independent academic centers across five Ohio universities,” according to the Ohio Senate’s website.

Ohio State’s Board of Trustees appointed Lee Strang, a former law professor at the University of Toledo with a background in constitutional law, to head the center.?

As the former inaugural director of the Institute for American Constitutional Thought and Leadership at the University of Toledo, Strang said the need for these centers across university campuses came from the growing number of students he and his constituents saw in the classroom “who didn’t have a significant knowledge of the common American civic tradition.”

“Whenever I teach constitutional law, I always ask my students how many of them have read the Constitution, and if they’ve seen it printed out — it’s two sides of one sheet, it’s very short — and I would say 10-15% of people would have raised their hand,” Strang said. “The civic centers, from my perspective, were an opportunity to provide resources in an intentional place where the study of the American civic tradition from different disciplinary perspectives and different broader perspectives are brought into conversation in one particular academic unit.”

Trevor Brown, the current dean of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs and interim dean of the Fisher College of Business, said he endorsed Strang to serve as the head of the Center due to his “commitment to citizenship.” Though the center is located in the John Glenn College, Brown clarified the individual relationship between the College and the Center.?

“The Center will be an independent, autonomous academic unit physically located in the Glenn College,” Brown said. “So, it’s not a department within the Glenn College; it is its own standalone center, and it reports to the provost and the Office of Academic Affairs.”?

Strang said he helped facilitate the drafting and implementation of SB 117 after spending time as a fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison program — a group dedicated to “exploring enduring questions of American constitutional law and Western political thought,” according to its website.

Strang said he believes higher-education institutions play an integral role in curbing partisanship and political polarization, as they encourage their students to pursue truth via research, presenting arguments and receiving feedback — a responsibility, he said, that is beginning to go unfulfilled.

“I would say 10 years ago — different people might have different numbers, and some people may disagree, but about 10 years ago — I saw pressure from the outside world, the polarization of the outside world — where people, among other things, stop speaking with each other — starting to enter into higher [education],” Strang said. “We’ve seen that this has begun to impinge on the capacity of higher education to serve that truth-seeking purpose, that other things were getting in the way — people’s different political views, people’s different causes.”

Ohio Senate Bill 83 — also known as the “Higher Education Enhancement Act” — which aims to ban bias in the classroom and limits the teaching of what and how “controversial topics” are presented in an educational setting, has been sitting in the House Chambers for over a year, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.

Pranav Jani, president of the Ohio State chapter of the American Association of University Professors and director of Asian American Studies, said he believes the intentions behind SB 117 and SB 83 are enough to cause doubts about SB 117’s actual promotion of free speech and intellectual diversity.?

“There’s this fiction that the university has become this big institution for left-wing and liberal thought, and that this needs to be corrected,” Jani, who is also an Ohio State associate professor of English, said. “That’s at the heart of SB 83, and that’s at the heart of SB 117, but it looks like a neutral policy.”

In addition, Jani said he thinks politicians are passing “smaller” bills like SB 117 as an avenue to get around SB 83’s slow movement.?

“What we expect, and have expected, is that this big, messy [Senate Bill 83] — with all these parts, which has been amended so many times — would get broken down into little bits and pieces and passed one by one,” said Jani.

Strang said his time spent at other universities, exploring their methods in teaching American civic tradition and constitutional thought, led him to bring the same ideas to Toledo and, eventually, Ohio State.

“What I saw at the James Madison Program was a way in which my faith, my desire to be part of the life of ideas could be revived, could be reinvigorated, because the James Madison Program was doing that at Princeton, was facilitating what was going on at Princeton, making an already great university even better,” Strang said. “So, I came back to Ohio at the University of Toledo at the time with the idea of ‘I want to do something like the James Madison program at my university,’ and I would talk to anybody who would listen.”

In terms of protecting and promoting free speech on campus through the legislation, Strang said he hopes to implement the bill’s mission in three major ways: student programming, tradition and discourse.

“We are going to offer classes on the American civic tradition, and that includes the things that hold this together — so the Constitution, but also the Declaration [of Independence], the Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, [documents] that the individual personalities of our tradition, great people, but average people that built America — [have] contributed to civic tradition, the skill that we Americans need in order to engage with each other in that civic tradition,” Strang said.

As for “civic tradition,” Strang said the term refers to historical American texts — as opposed to ideologies or partisanship — and aims to focus more on the ongoing debate about what tradition really means in reference to these texts.?

“What I want to highlight is one aspect of the American civic tradition that I think is going to be really important to the Chase Center to emphasize, which is Americans’ debate about what the tradition is; are some particular people or documents in it or not in it?” Strang said.

Strang said he knows discourse is not uncommon at Ohio State — a primary critique of the legislation among faculty and students in opposition to the bill, Jani said — with programming across several colleges that works to promote the successful navigation of challenging conversations and active listening, but the Chase Center hopes to only augment these pre-existing resources.

“Something [Ohio State] does extremely well already is civil discourse — so, having discussions across difference — and one of my jobs is to find what are the ways in which the [Chase] Center can partner and collaborate with the extraordinary things that are going on in that area already,” Strang said.

Strang said he plans to create an academic unit of faculty from multiple disciplinary perspectives, which will provide knowledge in the form of classes and mentorship opportunities.?

He said the goal is to invite students into the center’s academic life to make students feel like they can engage in a program that allows them opportunities to have intellectual and fulfilling conversations.

“One of the things that I loved about college was that we would have classes, and those were great, but then I would spend time with my classmates — outside of the classroom, in the hall, maybe in the dorm, sometimes late at night, sometimes over alcoholic beverages — continuing in that conversation,” Strang said. “I want the Chase Center to be a place where that kind of robust, ongoing conversation between people from all different perspectives continues, and one way to do that is something called a disputatio.”

Strand said the name “disputatio” was derived from a “medieval antecedent from the University of the Middle Ages” and encourages students to engage in civil discourse with their professor or mentor in a comfortable environment that encourages intellectual challenge and debate.

“I’m in the classroom, and the students are invited [to say] ‘Hey, ask Strang any question on his area of expertise, challenge him, respond to his arguments,’” Strang said.? “And we do it over food and drink, so that kind of intellectual engagement with students, sharing in that common academic life, is the last part of that.”?

Michael Neblo, director of the Institute for Democratic Engagement and Accountability, said he hopes the center can achieve its goal of fostering intellectual diversity and conversation across differences while also keeping in mind the potential for more polarization.?

“The potential downsides are the way the goals of the center get pursued and whether they emerge in a stark role-specific way, meaning more conservative faculty members see it as their job to articulate the conservative point of view, to mentor students, to counterbalance left-of-center faculty,” Neblo said.

Neblo said he believes a role-specific approach from faculty on all sides of the political spectrum can do more harm in separating a campus community, in the sense that even if faculty don’t see it this way, students may.?

“If you’re a right-of-center student, you go hang out with this group of faculty, and maybe once in a while we’ll hold events where we get together, but it’s Team Red and Team Blue, and, to my mind, that’s profoundly unintellectual and not conducive to the broader academic mission,” Neblo said.

Students can expect solidified programming, course options and a permanent home for the center as plans develop through the spring and autumn semesters of 2025, Strang said.?

This article was updated Oct. 18 at 6:50 p.m. to accurately reflect the John Glenn College’s connection to the Salmon P. Chase Center.