The small hearing room at the Ohio Statehouse is packed. The overflow room next-door is full, as well—and both are roped off. State Highway Patrol officers in tall hats direct people who have come to oppose the bill that’s on the Workforce and Higher Education Committee’s docket to a second overflow site set up in the Capitol crypt. So far, 80 people have signed up to fill the three hours allotted for opposition testimony in a hearing timed to spring break for many public universities. More than 700 people have submitted written testimony. They’re all out in force against the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, which detractors say is an attack on student diversity and intellectual freedom that will destabilize higher education across the state and touch off a brain drain that might permanently and detrimentally alter the course of the state’s economy.
If passed, the 76-page Frankenstein bill, known under its state Senate number Senate Bill 1, would prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion from scholarships, job descriptions, orientations, and trainings at Ohio public colleges and universities. It would shutter DEI offices or departments and require institutions to respond to complaints alleging noncompliance with the DEI ban.
S.B. 1 would also prohibit institutions from endorsing or opposing any belief or policy deemed politically “controversial,” such as “climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage and abortion.” Schools that do not comply would risk losing state funding.
Apparently to ensure no one sneaks any DEI into the curriculum, the bill would also require faculty to post their syllabi online, which opponents note would make them searchable for anyone online trying to ferret out DEI in coursework—or, more broadly, would allow would-be trolls to target individual professors.
While some of Trump’s anti-DEI federal orders are being blocked by injunctions, S.B. 1 would codify a higher-ed DEI ban at Ohio’s 14 public universities and 23 public colleges, impacting over 440,000 enrolled students. By imposing processes to report complaints concerning DEI, S.B. 1 would also establish a grotesque surveillance system that would stifle classroom debate and expression. Then, as a cudgel for any “problem” faculty, the bill would also effectively end job protections via faculty tenure and limit faculty collective bargaining.
As the opposition mills through the statehouse basement—some in suits, at least one student in what appears to be pajama shorts—there’s a sense that they are the last line of defense protecting Ohio’s public higher education.
The bill, which has been defeated previously, is resurfacing at a trying time for higher ed. Ohio’s transgender “bathroom ban,” which went into effect at the end of February, requires students in K-12 schools, as well as public and private colleges and universities, to use the bathroom that matches the gender they were assigned at birth. President Donald Trump’s January executive order terminating all environmental justice offices and all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, or DEIA programs, claimed such efforts were “discriminatory” and “illegal,” and threatened to withdraw federal funds from institutions that continued to promote DEI.
Some universities have already scraped DEI pages from their websites. The University of Akron canceled its nearly two-decade-old “Rethinking Race” forum. Ohio University put a hold on its Black Alumni Reunion, citing new federal guidance and proposed state legislation. OU students responded with a walkout, and hundreds protested. OU President Lori Stewart Gonzalez promised the university would not preemptively make changes due to “a bill that is not finalized” (referring to S.B. 1). Days later, OU reversed course, putting a hold on a National Women’s History Month event, Celebrate Women, again citing federal guidance and proposed state legislation.
Days before the Ohio transgender bathroom ban went into effect, the University of Cincinnati quietly swapped out its restroom signs to read “BIOLOGICAL MEN” and “BIOLOGICAL WOMEN.” It also changed “all-gender” bathroom signs to single-occupancy. The outcry on campus was almost immediate, with signs getting ripped off walls or covered with handmade generic “Bathroom” signs. Within days, University of Cincinnati president Neville Pinto announced UC would be rolling back its DEI efforts in response to Trump’s executive order. With the threat of S.B. 1 fresh across the state, capitulation by university administrators was met with vocal protest. Hundreds of students and faculty stormed a board of trustees meeting, chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, S.B. 1 has got to go.” They carried signs shaming administrators for “preemptive compliance.”
At the end of February, Ohio State University announced it would close two offices focused on DEI, cutting more than two dozen staff positions in that closure’s wake. OSU president Ted Carter said he knew the changes would “disappoint” many. Last week, roughly one thousand students and faculty showed up to protest the university’s rollbacks and S.B. 1. It was the biggest protest seen on campus since the anti-apartheid era. Protesters swapped out the lyrics to the school song, “Carmen Ohio,” instead singing a lament, “As Carter caves to Cirino’s will.” (State Senator Jerry Cirino is S.B. 1’s sponsor in that body.)
With OSU president Carter “complying in advance,” faculty are worried for students, for the state of education in Ohio, and for the impact to the state’s economy.
Students are not interested in attending a university that will not cover “basic kinds of intellectual projects, discussing what this bill calls controversial topics,” said Shannon Winnubst, a professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at OSU. “They’ll go to other states.” According to Winnubst, their young scholars see S.B. 1 as a kind of war on youth, bent on denying the education young people deserve.
Winnubst also points to the millions of dollars that faculty research—on allegedly “controversial” topics like climate change—brings into the state. Between driving away Ohio’s brightest and repelling faculty who bring research dollars into the state, S.B. 1 essentially sends a message to new minds seeking their own place in higher education that Ohio is closed for business. Taken as a whole, Winnubst sees S.B. 1 as bringing “economic wreckage for the state.”
David Weinberg, an astronomy professor at OSU, describes how his department has, over the last 15 years, become more representative of Ohio; its students and researchers now look more like the United States and the world in terms of gender, race, and religion. Diversity makes a “huge difference” in everything from approaches to experiments, views of how collaborations should be organized, and just generally, ideas about “how the universe works.”
Weinberg says the bill will make it “more burdensome and less rewarding to be a professor in the state of Ohio,” but suspects the most immediate effect of S.B. 1 would be on students, some of whom are succeeding in the program but now, in the shadow of S.B. 1, are “looking for an exit” and wondering what other university they could move to outside Ohio.
Ohio-based companies, seeking scientifically trained minds, make a habit of courting Weinberg’s students. While astronomy may bring funding to Ohio due to the department’s work with NASA and ground-based telescopes, the department’s students take jobs in all areas of data science and technology.
“I think that taking a hammer to the quality of the universities in Ohio is going to have a big negative impact on the ability of our universities to really power the economy,” Weinberg says.
For scale, Ohio State University alone contributes more than $19 billion to the state’s economy and supports nearly 117,000 jobs. The state’s public colleges and universities together deliver over $68 billion to Ohio. Destabilizing the sector is especially perilous now as the state finally shows signs of reversing a generation-long battle against brain drain—in which many of its brightest young people left for opportunities elsewhere. Moreover, the “brain gain” that Ohio has lately enjoyed is largely due to highly skilled immigrants being drawn to the state—university medical and research centers being among the top draws for this diverse pool of workers.
It appears likely that S.B. 1 would also undermine some students’ ability to get certified in their field of study.
“Our profession is nationally accredited, and in order to be a licensed social worker, you have to graduate from an accredited school. Per our accreditation standards, curriculum is required to include anti-racism, diversity, equity, and inclusion throughout the curriculum,” says Jodi Whitted, professor of social work at University of Cincinnati. She says the curriculum has just been updated so every single class includes anti-racism within the DEI standards. It’s not clear how the curriculum could have DEI wiped from it and still fulfill licensure requirements.
Whitted says her students are very worried about “what their education is going to look like should this pass.”
She’s hearing from speech and language pathologists, occupational and physical therapists, and other medical professionals for whom anti-racism and DEI are core competencies. “This wouldn’t just impact social work, but this would impact so many other professions that require licensure,” notes Whitted.
S.B. 1 seems to be “animated by this myth of liberal indoctrination,” Weinberg told me. The language of the bill implies that liberal professors are foisting their personal ideologies upon students and that conservative students need to have safe spaces carved out for them. Provisions in the bill prohibit “political and ideological litmus tests” in hiring and admissions.
One of the key complicating factors of S.B. 1 is that legislators appear to be falsely equating DEI with affirmative action (the latter was abolished in a 2023 Supreme Court ruling).
On campus, DEI programs often include student success programs for underrepresented students, notes Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the Ohio Conference of the American Association of University Professors. This might mean student affinity groups for first-generation students or a Latino Student Union, programs that help with student retention, so students who matriculate feel at home on campus and eventually graduate. S.B. 1 bans DEI scholarships, so students who have the merit to get accepted but don’t have the money for tuition may not get to attend.
Erasing acknowledgment of difference will make people of color, women, LGBTQ people, veterans, and students with disabilities less able to fit into campus life.
The bill is so vaguely worded that it appears anything housed under the umbrella of “DEI” on campus would be eliminated. “A lot of times, disability services, veteran services, those kinds of things are under those umbrellas,” says Kilpatrick.
“I think higher education should be all about being able to discuss and think critically about the most pressing issues that face our world,” says Arianna Kelawala, an OSU fourth-year student. “I do think that S.B. 1 creates a sort of chilling effect,” She is concerned that faculty, unwilling to teach “both sides” of supposedly “controversial issues,” just won’t teach the topics at all.
An earlier version of this bill, which also attacked faculty collective bargaining and banned “bias” in teaching went internationally viral and ultimately stalled after Republican State Representative Sarah Fowler Arthur said she wanted students to learn about the Holocaust from “both sides” (that is to say, to include the viewpoint of German soldiers tasked with carrying out the “Final Solution”). Suffice it to say, it’s easy to imagine a professor not wanting to teach that.
Kelawala, also an organizer with the Ohio grassroots group OPAWL—Building AAPI Feminist Leadership, points out that tucked into S.B. 1 is also a ban on Ohio public colleges and universities partnering with or accepting funds from any entity associated with the government of China. Singling out relationships with China leaves “room for anti-Asian hatred to kind of seep through here.”
Kelawala is applying to law school and hoped to attend in-state, but the looming reality of S.B. 1 “definitely does present an additional factor to consider.”
Last week, another protest of about 150 medical staff, researchers, and students gathered at a park between the University of Cincinnati Medical Center and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. (The former has a $4 billion economic impact; Cincinnati Children’s, a consistently top-ranked children’s hospital, has a research foundation that alone draws $304.7 million in external funding.) The group protested federal cuts to scientific funding and actions at the state and federal level to ban DEI.
The group was concerned about how broad-brush cuts to “DEI” would affect research. Kylee Ham, union president of UC’s nurse’s union told me her family moved from Texas to Cincinnati for her husband’s medical training. Cincinnati is a hub for medicine and research. S.B. 1 imperils the very workers the state has been working to attract.
“S.B. 1 attacks the faculty and postgraduates’ ability to have a collective bargaining agreement and be able to strike. A worker’s power is in the ability to withhold their work. Our work has value … we deserve to have that power,” said Kylee Ham, union president of UC’s nurses’ union.
This is one of the bill’s most under-sung—and diabolical—features. S.B. 1 rides a wave of anti-DEI sentiment and culture-war politics to “cover the fact that it’s really a union-busting bill that will make all faculty at-will employees,” says Kilpatrick. S.B. 1 threatens core principles of academic freedom, shared governance, job security for faculty—including tenure. “Faculty are not going to want to come to Ohio,” says Kilpatrick, if Ohio has a reputation for “trying to censure free speech at institutions” and “essentially punish[ing] faculty for their perceived bias, when they still haven’t shown a shred of proof.”
Faculty unions would essentially only be able to bargain over salary and benefits, not over evaluations, workload, tenure, or layoffs. That means that in a negotiation, the highest-paid faculty could simply be laid off. Whole departments could be eliminated.
Among those Ohio Republicans opposed to S.B. 1 is John T. Plecnik, a professor of law at Cleveland State University who also happens to be a Republican county commissioner from Lake County, Ohio. He claimed the title of “the most conservative professor in Ohio,” and called S.B. 1 “a dumpster fire that threatens to incinerate free speech on campus.” Faculty job insecurity cuts both ways. Plecnik warned that a “liberal dean or administrator would be able to use two years of below-average reviews in any category as a pretext to discipline or fire a conservative professor.”
Arguing that S.B. 1 is unconstitutional and would weaken academic freedoms, this morning, Plecnik suggested debates like these over free speech and the First Amendment belong on college campuses. “This should be moot court; mock trial. This should be a forum on campus. The fact that we’re having to have this discussion now shows that some people needed to spend another year in college,” Plecnik quipped, and after a three-second delay for the telecast, an uproar of cheers and laughter rang out from the adjoining overflow room.
More than 1,000 Ohioans submitted opposition testimony in the Senate (compared to 15 proponents who supported S.B. 1). Still, the bill passed the Ohio state Senate 21–11, with two Republicans joining the Ohio Senate’s nine Democrats. It is anticipated to pass the Ohio House.
“Governor DeWine has been a big workforce development/economic development Governor, and I just can’t imagine that he would want a bill that so obviously will hurt workforce development in Ohio,” says Kilpatrick. But DeWine is a term-limited Republican in a highly gerrymandered state with a resulting Republican supermajority in the state legislature.
“If this bill had been introduced 10 years ago … it would not have seen the light of day in its current form,” says Kilpatrick.
Kilpatrick, who also advocated against an earlier version of S.B. 1 in a prior general assembly, says many Republican legislators don’t like the bill and don’t want to vote on it. But “they feel like they have to or otherwise they might get primaried.”
Ohio, like many other states, is in a vicious cycle where gerrymandering moves state legislatures to the right of their populus, extreme legislators get rewarded, moderates are punished, and the state’s laws grow increasingly detached from the needs of the state. Republicans are locked into power but locked out of governing effectively.
“We’re at the point where it’s gerrymandering and big money together,” notes David Pepper, an expert on gerrymandering and author of Laboratories of Autocracy. Those who oppose the most extreme positions fear being primaried, as happened in Texas after some Republicans opposed an extreme school voucher bill. Dollars flowed in from out-of-state super PACS, driving most out of office.
“The thing about gerrymandered worlds with no accountability is time is on their side. So, if they screw something up,” like the horrifying Holocaust quip the last time the bill was considered, “they learn from the mistake … and just sort of roll right on forward,” he said.
As the hearing closed today, a spontaneous roar rang out from the Statehouse crypt. “Kill the bill! Kill the bill!” Voices echoed off the vaulted ceilings of the people’s house.
Despite its unpopularity with many Ohioans, there are other forces at work that could overrule the will of the people. The Trump administration commitment to scrambling DEI, undermining scientific research, and undercutting higher education itself seems absolute. S.B. 1 may be a self-destruct button for the state of Ohio, but it would seem that the powers that be are ready to press it. But the voices of protest keep rising.
