March 4 is a nationwide AFT day of action to protect our communities and fight for a better life for all—for opportunity, freedom, safety and affordability.
FAM’s Southwest Ohio Labor Coalition held a press conference and rally at Levine Park in front of UC Medical Center, where FAM President Theresa Kulbaga (TK) and leaders from Cincinnati Federation of Teachers, Ohio Nurses Association, and University of Cincinnati spoke out against Ohio legislative attacks on higher education and our immigrant students, colleagues, and neighbors.
Below is a transcript of TK’s speech. You can read press coverage of the event, with additional quotes, here.
I am Dr. Theresa Kulbaga, a Professor of English at Miami University and President of the Faculty Alliance of Miami, AAUP-AFT Local 375.
I am proud and humbled to stand here today with my colleagues across sectors that support the public good — K-12 education, higher education, and nursing — who dedicate our lives to care for the people in our communities. Today, we are standing together to fight for our students, patients, and colleagues.
We are standing together to protect our communities against
Cuts to schools and child care;
Cuts to healthcare and public services;
Attempts to control what is taught in college classrooms; and
Immigration raids that make schools, campuses, and communities less safe.
At Miami University and in colleges and universities across Ohio, student learning is under attack by state legislators in Columbus — who are not educators — but who are attempting to control what can be taught, who can protest, and what kind of scholarly collaborations are possible across national borders. Despite First Amendment rights and a century or more of building up higher education as a public good, Ohio’s lawmakers are now engaging in ideological warfare against specific university course content and faculty collective bargaining rights. Through Senate Bill 1, which was passed last year, Ohio’s public university faculty now must worry about state-mandated student evaluation questions designed to target marginalized faculty and course content related to American history, race and gender, and climate change. Ohio’s lawmakers — again, not experts in education or in American history or any of the subjects they are targeting — want to curtail student learning and free expression in the name of “advancing” higher education. And now they want to pass HB 698, an SB1 “enforcement” law, that will cut even more state funding from our universities.
How does it advance higher education to limit what students can learn? How does it advance higher education to limit the support mechanisms, including Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion centers, that are available to them on campus? How does it attract college students to Ohio, or keep them here in the state once they graduate, if we refuse to prepare them for the challenges of the 21st century workplace and world?
Likewise, how does it advance higher education to target international students and faculty, as both the state legislature and the Trump administration have done? Ohio lawmakers want to pass a suite of bills mandating that schools, hospitals, and daycares cooperate with ICE agents. They even want to forbid immigrants — our colleagues and neighbors — from purchasing property in Ohio through HB1/SB88. How does it advance student learning and Ohio’s economy to threaten to bring ICE agents to schools, campuses, and hospitals? These bills will not make students or patients safer — it will only intimidate them and keep them from seeking healthcare or completing their educations.
We demand that Ohio lawmakers stop attacking K-12 education, higher education, and our siblings in the nursing and social work professions. These are professions that exist to serve the public good. We exist to educate children, to prepare adults for careers and civic life, and to take care of the health, safety, and wellbeing of our communities. Ohio lawmakers need to value the professionals who devote our careers to the public good and who improve Ohio for all of us.
Stop cutting our funding. Stop trying to develop a state higher education curriculum when you are not experts and you are not educators. Stop attacking the people who support student learning and change lives. Stop targeting our immigrant students, colleagues, and neighbors, who make Ohio great and who contribute billions of dollars, including $2.4 billion or more in tax dollars, to the state economy. No federal agents in schools or on campuses. HANDS OFF HIGHER ED.
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