COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) -- Lawmakers want to make several changes to public higher education in the state.     Many of the proposals are not new -- they were introduced last general assembly, stalled, and are now reintroduced as Senate Bill 1, sponsored by Ohio Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland).  “Students are now political chess pieces in a game that is bigger than us,” Ohio State University junior Brielle Shorter said.  New federal block on SNAP reimbursement program being felt in Ohio “I would ask everyone to step back and look at this and see why this is good for Ohio in this,” Cirino said.  The bill, known as The Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, prohibits college campuses from any diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices; those practices include hiring, scholarships and training. In part, the bill’s sponsor said this is to ensure equity on college campuses and promote a diversity of thought and ideas.  “I think the entirety of the bill is a threat to public universities all across all across Ohio,” Shorter said. “For me, the things that stand out the most is just this idea of censorship.”    “I've talked with a lot of professors and students who are self-censoring, and feel the need,” Cirino said. “Not just the DEI side of it.”     For any university that does not eliminate its DEI practices, the legislation allows the state to pull taxpayer funding.  How northwest Columbus power outage affected businesses SB1 prohibits universities from endorsing or opposing, as an institution, “any controversial belief or policy, except on matters that directly the institutions funding, or mission of discovery, improvement and dissemination of knowledge.”  The legislation also lays out a faculty-review system for students, and requires that at least one of the questions be, “Does the faculty member create a classroom atmosphere free of politics, racial, gender and religious bias?”  “Some of what we're doing is trying to move things more to the center, to a neutral position,” Cirino said.  “If faculty have a political bias, it doesn't manifest in grading or in speech acts as far as we can find,” professor of more than 15 years, Christopher McKnight Nichols, said. “And so, this is a really flawed logic that's central to this whole bill.”   One of the more controversial aspects of the bill would prohibit faculty from striking. Cirino said it is the ensure that students’ best interests are always central. But Nichols said that part of the bill assumes that professors strike for sinister reasons.     “They're striking for things like classrooms that don't leak, air conditioning or heating,” Nichols said. “They're also striking for their salaries and benefits. But it's very often things that students are sympathetic to. When you attack collective bargaining and striking, whatever the presumptions are, other unions feel under threat as well.”  Use Cash App? You may be entitled to some money “There are other actions that that faculty can take,” Cirino said. “There’s arbitration, there's mediation, there's lots of other methods that are available here. Why potentially disadvantage the students?”  The bill also proposes a required “American civic literacy” course. It’s described as a three-credit-hour course with a list of seven required readings including the U.S. Constitution, a minimum of five essays from the Federalist papers, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the letter from Birmingham Jail written by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  “I think students who graduate, even if you're graduating in architecture, you need to know a little bit about the founding documents of our country,” Cirino said.     Nichols said, as a history professor, he could get on board with this course, but said the problem is that the curriculum is being prescribed by state law with no input from faculty.   “Educators, students, alumni, staff are left out,” he said. “The people to develop this curriculum are practitioners of the field. Some of the architects of this bill have rushed, yet again, too fast to put in their own political prescriptions without realizing the consequences for students, for faculty staff and for the state.”  As for how the bill would be enforced, Cirino said if it passes, he expects cooperation but said that otherwise, he is the Senate’s finance committee chairperson and there are “other means to make sure that they are following the will of the legislature,” alluding the possibility of pulling funding.  “I fully expect cooperation, though,” he said. “I know all the presidents. I know many, many of the trustees. I expect cooperation. They may not like some aspects of it, but I expect that they will cooperate. Yes.”   “That's a classic political move,” Nichols said. “It's using the power of the purse to enforce whatever the politicians want. One of the tragedies of that is that Ohio has consistently underfunded and restricted funding to higher ed.”   The legislation also includes provisions that shorten a trustee’s term from nine to six years, post-tenure review measures and requires professors to post their syllabi publicly and accessible within three clicks.     Both Senate and House higher education committee leaders said hearings will begin on Senate Bill 1 and its identical House bill as soon as next week.