Timothy Messer-Kruse is a Professor at Bowling Green State University. Kruse was a professor in the Ethnic Studies Department for 17 years, before transferring to the History Department in response to Ohio Senate Bill 83.

Introduced in March 2023, Ohio Senate Bill 83 is currently awaiting approval from the Ohio House and Governor. If passed, the bill will introduce new themes that all state institutions must include in a general education requirements course. According to an opinion piece Kruse wrote for The Columbus Dispatch, the course must cover “the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, ‘5 essays from the Federalist Papers,’ the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail.’”

Kruse says he will have no problem teaching all of the concepts and theories that he used to teach in the Ethnic Studies department. To prove this, he shared part of a syllabus he’s working on to meet these requirements: 

• “Week 1: Discuss leading theories of how the patriot’s determination to protect slavery led to the American Revolution and how the rise of “scientific” racism influenced Jefferson’s wording of the Declaration of Independence. 

 

• Week 2: Consider scholarly debates about the ways in which the U.S. Constitution advanced slavery and established a system of structural racism that denied African and Native Americans basic human rights. 

• Week 3: Examine the views and actions of the authors of the Federalist Papers. Why did Madison, Jay, and Hamilton all demand that Britain return the thousands of fugitive slaves they protected in New York City so they could be tortured and killed as a lesson to others? Why did Jay, who claimed to be an abolitionist, drag his young slave Abbe to Paris? Why did he have her hunted and thrown into a dungeon (where she perished) when she ran away? 

• Week 4: Exploration of Lincoln’s reluctance to turn the Civil war into one of liberation until African Americans forced his hand. Discussion of why, even after Emancipation, Lincoln tried to arrange the expulsion of all black Americans to Central America. 

• Week 5: How was the promise of the Gettysburg Address to “have a new birth of freedom” undermined by a conservative Supreme Court? Did pervasive white racism that cheered the growth of Jim Crow abort that birth? 

• Week 6: Discuss what King meant when he referred to the “white power structure” of Birmingham and America. What is this “structure” and how did it operate? We will attempt to understand the evils King complained of, such as “police brutality,” “racial injustice,” and “smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society.””

 

Kruse wrote a separate opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed titled, “Anti-Wokeism and the Vulnerability of Interdisciplinarity,” where he argues the department of ethnic studies is “ill protected by disciplinary norms of academic freedom.” He begins by claiming,

“Conservative attacks on critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion programs and anything labeled ‘woke’ have rekindled a national conversation over the proper role of the university in society.”

He continues:

“The threat to ethnic studies, and similar fields across the broad realm of cultural studies, is not only that it focuses its critical gaze squarely upon the most angry and festered spot on our body politic, but that its subject is increasingly viewed as something that cannot, or should not, be studied at all.” 

Kruse concludes his argument by writing:

“The operative theory underlying the tsunami of antiwoke legislation is that race (and sex/gender) are natural, given things that everyone should accept and no one should pay any attention to. This reflects a widespread public denial that scholars have gained any meaningful insights into the workings of racism or race itself. Such rejection is the inevitable consequence of seeing race as a natural and uncomplicated aspect of human experience and racism as a belief that can be as easily embraced as it is eschewed.”

 

Published – August 3, 2023