In 2008, then Ohio governor Ted Strickland said America’s public systems of higher education “strengthen our people” and “provide ideas that our [nation] needs to grow.”1 I agree that they should do this. After recently serving as a trustee of The Ohio State University at Mansfield for nine years, though, I have begun to believe that in some very important ways, they are actually undermining and doing significant harm to these essential goals.
Numerous surveys and studies show that the faculty and administrations of America’s major public campuses are, politically, well to the left of the typical American. This would not be cause for concern—or the writing of this essay—if these political preferences were merely expressed by faculty and administrators in their private activities as citizens and had no significant impact on the quality of education, programming, or scholarship
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