Editorial

Part Two

Student Life versus student lives?

Provost/OAA is not the worse example on campus. That ignoble prize goes to the Office of Student Life or SL. This model for disorganization and dysfunction is headed by a Vice President, who according to the one dimensional organizational chart on its dizzying uninformative website, sits above 10 Associate Vice Presidents and a “leadership team.”

Part One

Introduction

Faculty, staff, and students are OSU’s greatest assets. But the university’s leaders by sloganeering rarely acknowledge that. Students, staff, and faculty do not share President Kristina Johnson’s incessant personal identification and embrace of “My Fellow Buckeyes” or “Born to be a Buckeye.” They are demoralized. Faculty and staff in particular, but also many students, with due cause, feel locked out of OSU decision-making and communications structures. Disaffection is high.

But senior administrators, awash in their sea of slogans, excessive numbers, and overpayment, do not see this. There is no evidence that they know or care. If Johnson was “born to be a Buckeye,” and both President and Provost adhere to a dramatically incomplete and distorted notion of “land-grant mission,” what else matters? In her mind, OSU is the world’s largest STEM University. Johnson has no time to look up between giving herself awards, giggling and showing selfies to Columbus Dispatch reporters, or watching the Board of Trustees over her shoulders.

On August 17, 2022, Columbus Dispatch announced that “Some parents who want to find an alternative to current public and private schools are looking at something called ‘classical education.’” 

Those few words are both misleading and revealing. No evidence is presented about any parents “looking,” other than the founders/promoters of the foundling retail—private—franchises of Columbus Classical Academy and Heart of Ohio Classical Academy. Is the name meant to evoke –or be confused with—Columbus’ highest-ranked private school, the Columbus Academy, another common marketing ploy?

More compelling, “something called ‘classical education’” misrepresents and exaggerates the relationship of this new marketing campaign to either “classical” or “education.”

There is truth in the old saying that “you can’t sue City Hall”—especially with any likelihood of either winning more than your costs or winning at all. That’s what attorneys who I’ve consulted tell me. This is true despite the fact that the “mayor,” City administrators and senior staff, City-appointed commission members, and City Councilors blend an exceptional combination of ignorance or dismissal/neglect of city, county, state, and federal laws.

Of course, they follow the lead of the State of Ohio where the Governor owns stock in corporations in which the State invests, the Lieutenant Governor accepts a paid position on a private-for profit Board of Trustees (rationalizing it as “educational” [but to whom?]); and the Attorney General and Secretary of State regularly express ignorance of State laws, State Constitution, and federal Constitution. So too do Republican senator and representatives especially but not only with collusion with corrupt firms like First Energy.

If Columbus, Ohio had a free (almost) daily press, this essay would be published in Columbus Dispatch. But it does not. As many readers are aware, I am banned from the unedited Opinion page of our local USA Today/Gannett outlet because I expressed the truth on its own readers’ comments site. I called the Opinion page “muddled” and “uninformed,” which no one can deny. As a result, the “Opinion and Engagement Editor,” who had published my essays and letters regularly and accepted my advice, summarily banned me from its pages. This contravenes both the First Amendment and USA Today’s own thin Statement of Standards. Neither Dispatch nor USA Today/Gannett cares about that. The Opinion page makes it clear that truthfulness, facts, or clear English expression are not concerns.

I last saw Councilmember Shayla D. Favor on Tuesday, August 2nd. She and I had arrived at our mutual polling location at the Blackburn Community Center to cast our ballots in the Democratic primary election. As luck would have it, we’re registered in the same district, District 1. 

Our exchanges over the previous two months had been contentious if cordial, negotiable if slightly adversarial. As Chair of Housing and Health and Human Services, her office had the keenest interest in Camp Shameless, a houseless camp for which I advocate as a member of a local nonprofit called FIRST Collective, a group of activists making art, creating social infrastructure and fostering community through mutual aid.

My position as an executive committee member with the Columbus Coalition for Rent Control has put us in a place of needed negotiation given Councilmember Favor’s position as well. 

I last saw Councilmember Shayla D. Favor on Tuesday, August 2nd. She and I had arrived at our mutual polling location at the Blackburn Community Center to cast our ballots in the Democratic primary election. As luck would have it, we’re registered in the same district, District 1. 

Our exchanges over the previous two months had been contentious if cordial, negotiable if slightly adversarial. As Chair of Housing and Health and Human Services, her office had the keenest interest in Camp Shameless, a houseless camp for which I advocate as a member of a local nonprofit called FIRST Collective, a group of activists making art, creating social infrastructure and fostering community through mutual aid.

My position as an executive committee member with the Columbus Coalition for Rent Control has put us in a place of needed negotiation given Councilmember Favor’s position as well. 

We live in an age of division. As the briefest glance at news media shows, contemporary universities are so often centers of differences, contradictions, and clashes between knowledge and ignorance off- and on-campus. One revealing site of combat is the false opposition of the faculty and the—to faculty and academic administration—second-class “professionals” in departments of student affairs and student life. This dichotomy, and its underlying both real and imaginary conflicts, critically parallels those between “learning and earning,” humanities’ core curriculum and “great books” vs. STEM and business education, curriculum vs. extracurriculum, and on-campus vs. off-campus life.

In this essay, as a retired humanities professor who taught for almost half a century at three public universities in large cities, and who lives in my city’s University District, I propose to seize on the strengths of both sides of what I see as a fallacious and harmful dichotomy. I seek to bring them closer together in the interests of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, the suffering health of our universities, the advancement of young adults, and the needs of our nation.

Do the Mayor, City Council, and senior staff need a map of Columbus? A walking tour? A bus tour of their “Opportunity for a Few City”? They cannot turn to Columbus Partnership whose CEO lives in New Albany, the Downtown Development Corporation which does recognize the actual downtown, Columbus Police Department who does not know one area from another, or the Department of Public—that is, Private—Service who sells public space to private interests indiscriminately. I personally give walking tours of the University District to City Neighborhood staff but I recognize my limits. City government does not know the city.

The Mayor’s and Council’s obsession with protecting private property in the Short North—the only area where their actions even vaguely resemble a policy—that is, a set of somewhat related actions rather than random undeveloped and unvetted stabs in the dark—and with environmental damage to the Scioto River Bank with private development convince me that our undemocratically selected “leaders” do not know the locations or the socio-economic geography within Columbus whose history and identity remain unknown.

All codependent relationships cause collateral damage. In the case of a failing marriage with children, the parent’s spawn tend to bear the brunt of the damage. In the case of the City of Columbus and big business, our people bear the brunt -- and many while accepting our lot as business-as-usual. In the meantime, our housing crisis puts increasing pressure on our most vulnerable populations. Often those in positions of power and specifically equipped to handle these crises are too far removed from them to understand their urgency on anything but an academic level.

During a podcast interview a few years ago, Council President Shannon Hardin described the nature of his position in business terms: The City of Columbus, in his view, is a corporation. The Mayor is our CEO and the Council President is our head of the Board of Directors.