CLEVELAND, Ohio — Gov. Mike DeWine stood before Ohio’s college trustees this week and urged them to “step up” recruiting. Make the campus tours warmer. Line up internships. Keep talent in Ohio.
The gall.
Just months ago, DeWine signed Senate Bill 1 — the single worst thing to happen to higher education in Ohio in a generation. SB 1 didn’t “reform” colleges. It ushered in what critics call an atmosphere of thought-policing, shuttered DEI support, and self-censorship that deters students and faculty alike.
It gutted shared governance, ordered the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion offices, imposed ideological “intellectual diversity” tests from Columbus, forced public posting of syllabi by deadline, and saddled universities with a new civics course mandate — while threatening tenure with politicized “for cause” termination. Then it told trustees to start chopping degree programs that don’t meet an arbitrary conferral quota.
The wrecking ball is already swinging. Ohio University plans to eliminate or merge 29 majors. The University of Toledo is suspending admissions to nine more. African and African American studies? Gutted or folded. Music programs? On the block. Because the threshold is mechanical — five degrees a year over three years — even some science and math B.A.s are at risk, regardless of their long-term academic value. If every campus makes the same cuts, whole fields can vanish from Ohio’s academic map.
Meanwhile, campuses are paying through the nose to comply. Kent State alone estimates $1.5–$2 million annually just to meet SB 1’s mandates, plus hundreds of thousands more to build the new civics course and retool syllabi systems. Across the state, DEI offices have been shuttered or repackaged, identity centers closed, and staff reassigned. Universities are building complaint portals, drafting “intellectual diversity” policies, and rewriting recruitment boilerplate to reflect a law that tells institutions to take no “position” on issues as basic as climate change — even as they’re supposed to train the scientists who study it.
This is the environment into which DeWine now says: Go recruit.
Recruit to what, exactly? A state that tells scholars what counts as a “controversial belief,” polices invited speakers, and empowers politicians — not faculty — to decide which programs live or die? A state where students are invited to turn in their professors for failing to welcome even the most fringe or discredited ideas, chilling classroom debate and making every lecture a potential minefield?
DeWine built his pep talk on some demographics: Ohio is projected to lose population, with smaller graduating classes and aging residents. He’s not wrong about the numbers. But you don’t counter a talent crisis by making your universities smaller, narrower and more timid — and then ordering them to smile harder on the campus tour.
Sure, he’ll point to his Governor’s Merit Scholarship: up to $5,000 a year for the top 5% of high-school grads who stay in-state. It’s popular — so popular, the state had to shift money around before the first cohort even arrived to keep awards whole. Good for those students.
But a scholarship that primarily helps the already most advantaged is not a substitute for a welcoming intellectual climate for everyone else. And it’s not a strategy when the legislature simultaneously tells campuses to ax programs, shutter support structures and teach under political supervision.
Let’s also drop the fiction that SB 1 merely trims “dead weight.” Universities have always rebalanced programs when demand changes. The difference now is who holds the scalpel — and what they’re cutting for. Shared governance is slow by design because it forces decisions to survive scrutiny from the people who actually teach and research. SB 1 replaces that deliberation with a crude quota.
The liberal arts aren’t a luxury. They’re the feature that makes a state adaptable. Today’s hot major may be obsolete in 10 years. What endures is the capacity to think, analyze, write and solve novel problems. Pair that with strong STEM and you get the workforce Ohio keeps saying it wants. You attract talent by advertising freedom and breadth at our universities, by widening the aperture of inquiry.
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But SB 1 undercuts all of that — by narrowing what can be taught and signaling to faculty that Ohio values obedience above all else. The best professors read that signal and choose to build labs elsewhere. So do the most ambitious students.
DeWine is demanding the impossible from our institutions of higher learning — to recruit more students to thinner, more constrained campuses. And when enrollment softens, he’ll blame “failing universities” rather than the law that kneecapped them.
If Ohio wants to compete with North Carolina and Georgia — states poised to leapfrog us in population — we cannot undermine the foundations that make a state attractive to families and employers.
So, as a mother of three daughters, who will likely seek to attend college in the coming years, here’s my simple message for the governor and our elected lawmakers: If you want students and families to choose Ohio universities, stop making them less worth attending. Restore robust shared governance. Let campuses decide their academic mix without ideological quotas. Reverse the rush to erase DEI functions that — in practice — help first-gen, rural, veteran and under-represented students find their footing, the very Ohioans we say we want to retain.
And if you insist on a civics mandate, fund it; don’t just order it.
Until then, spare the trustees the lectures. Ohio’s dwindling enrollment has little to do with marketing and campus tours and everything to do with values. And SB 1 sends exactly the wrong message to every student and scholar considering Ohio.
Leila Atassi is the editor of the Public Interest and Advocacy team at cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. She writes a weekly opinion column on state and local issues. You can reach her at latassi@cleveland.com.