By: Maeve Kelley
April 21, 2025
Senate Bill 1, officially titled the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, was signed into Ohio law on March 28th to take effect 90 days later on June 26th. The bill brings major reforms to public universities in the state, eliminating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, or DEI, programs and initiatives, creating new measures to ensure ‘intellectual diversity’ is prioritized in classrooms, and withholding state funding from universities who do not comply. The bill mirror executive orders coming from the Trump administration which aim to eliminate DEI from college campuses and without federal funding from those who do not comply.
Some highlights from the bill include prohibiting university faculty from striking, implementing faculty evaluations that will ask students if their professor promoted intellectual diversity and avoided bias, eliminate and withhold scholarships with DEI requirements, and limits classroom discussion of ‘controversial topics,’ some examples given being immigration policy, climate change, marriage, and abortion. Many of the policies will specifically impact professors and how they operate, as well as administrative staff. Bernhard Debatin, a journalism professor at OU, Director of the Center for Applied and Professional Ethics, and Director of Studies in the Honors Tutorial Journalism program, shared his concerns about the bill, stating, “It will enable the administration to remove professors that they identify as problematic, and that's pretty horrifying.”
According to a statement from Ohio University President Lori Gonzalez, OU is still unsure how these changes will be implemented next semester; Gonzalez states: “We know changes will likely need to be made, and we want to ensure those changes reflect an accurate interpretation of the law. As we know more, we will communicate with you and with our entire University community.” Even though the bill explicitly bans ‘the creation or continuation of diversity equity, and inclusion initiatives,’ OU has not yet stated if it will close its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, which includes the Pride Center, the Women’s Center, and the Multicultural Center. Professors I spoke with are also still awaiting communication from the university as to how exactly daily procedures will need to change.
Professors at OU are particularly concerned about two provisions that they believe will have significant impacts on teaching and curriculum: the mandated bias evaluations and the censorship of controversial topics in classroom discussions. Debatin teaches a course at OU called ‘Environmental Journalism,’ which handles many topics including climate change, and he expressed his uncertainty as to how that class will continue under SB1’s requirement for ‘intellectual diversity.’
“It’s a catch 22 question, because there is no topic where you do not have some controversy, and when there's controversy, there will always be somebody who feels like his or her viewpoint isn’t represented. So if I have a climate change denier in class and I’m covering climate change, either I include some bogus theories from someone with no scientific background who believes climate change doesn't exist— and then people who understand the sciences will say I'm biased because I included something that really shouldn't be there— but if I don't include it, the climate-change denier could say I'm biased because I didn't include his belief,” said Debatin.
Dr. Patricia Stokes, Associate Professor of Instruction for OU’s Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, or WGSS, program, has been teaching at OU for 25 years now, and feels that the limitation of ‘controversial topics’ under SB1 will conflict with some of the core subjects of WGSS. Stokes reported that it would be disingenuous to teach some WGSS courses without including the discussion of marriage and abortion. “In my feminist theory class, the midterm prompt is ‘how did early feminists see marriage and sexuality as sources of oppression, and what remedies did they see?’… I mean, these are real things in history, and we should be able to teach about that. Marriage is really the through line in most of the readings that we have there; it's the one topic that ties more things together than any other topic. If you can’t talk about marriage in the lives of women, you can't do much,” said Stokes.
Like Debatin, Stokes is concerned that the importance of ‘intellectual diversity’ mandated by SB1 will require her to add right-wing ideologies to her syllabi in WGSS courses. She stated: “Now, I have had language about viewpoint diversity on my syllabus from the very beginning, for over 20 years, but I also certainly am not going in and giving equal time to anti-feminists or men's rights. I could give equal time to the insults and the Andrew Tates, but is that really going to be a good use of our time? Those are just hateful ideologies.”
More urgently than changes to curriculum, Stokes fears that the SB1 mandate for professors to post their syllabi publicly could open the WGSS program up to harassment. “It’s not like I have something to hide, but I've seen what trolls act like and trolls are going to be attracted to these repositories of syllabi. I fully expect that we will get harassing emails. I hope we won't get fully doxed, but that could happen too, so that is something that I think is on many of our minds. … To have to say where and when your classes meet, that's scary; I mean, can you imagine a group of Proud Boys decides they're going to just visit my class one day? That's a scary thought.”
Characterizing the sentiments toward these provisions of SB1 amongst faculty in the WGSS program, Stokes stated: “We are thinking a little bit strategically about how to maintain academic freedom and not be teaching in fear but also not leaving ourselves be open to malicious actions, right? Because the law definitely does kind of open the door to malicious stuff happening.”
Debatin echoed this sentiment that some of SB1’s provisions specifically target professors in departments that often deal with social issues in their curriculum. Debatin is concerned that the terms of SB1, specifically the mandated course/faculty evaluations in which students will be asked if their professor was biased in their teaching, and if the professor promoted ‘intellectual diversity,’ will intimidate professors from talking about so-called ‘controversial topics,’ which according to SB1 include climate change, immigration policy, electoral policy, marriage, and abortion.
““If being biased is a category of its own, then it's easy for a student to say you failed in this category, and if you fail two years in a row, a post tenure review will be conducted. So it basically says your academic freedom ends at the point where somebody thinks you are biased, and that means it can be used against you as a reason for post tenure review, and we will basically have McCarthy-like trials in the worst case where people's political or other ideas, other beliefs, are being judged for whether you are worthy of tenure or not,” said Debatin, “It's created to make faculty look biased, because there is no way not to be biased. This stretches from the humanities into the social sciences and all the way into the sciences, because the very nature of academic research, exploration, and teaching is that everything deals with issues that are to some degree controversial, because a lot of it is about, ‘do we know this?’”
Debatin reported that he does not plan to make any changes to his syllabi for his course Environmental Journalism or censor the conversation if the topic of climate change arises. “I'm relatively close to retirement, so if I were in a situation where a post tenure review was done and there was a danger of getting de-tenured, I would be willing to go through this process just to show that the threat of it still doesn't discourage me. If I’m de-tenured, so be it— I'm not particularly afraid of that, but I also acknowledge that I'm in a different position than a young person with a family who just got tenure or is still un-tenured. … I am not so easily intimidated.”
Stokes is in a different position, as the nature of her role makes her ineligible for tenure, meaning she has less job security than tenured faculty. She reported that she is still awaiting communication from the university as to if she will need to make any changes to her syllabi for her WGSS courses, but she will comply with SB1.
Students at OU are also concerned about the future of their education under SB1. Provisions of SB1 most impacting students include the end of scholarships with DEI requirements, loss of student resources provided by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and a new requirement for all students to take a three-credit-hour course covering American civil literacy and capitalism.
Julie Brown is a senior at OU majoring in Social Work and minoring in WGSS. She reported that there is tangible concern in her classrooms amongst her peers and faculty as to how those departments will be impacted. She stated: “I’m seriously concerned about the future of WGSS with Trump in office and now SB1 going into effect soon. Some of my teachers have talked about it in class and the general consensus is just fear, fear for their jobs and for the future of the whole program at this point. … The bill doesn’t explicitly say that WGSS is under attack, but it certainly implies it by attacking DEI.”
Brown also lamented the loss of DEI programs, such as OU’s Pride Center, Women’s Center, and Multicultural Center. “As a queer woman, I always felt accepted at OU because of those DEI initiatives that literally existed in order to make queer people and other minorities feel more comfortable here. It’s sad knowing that future queer students coming to OU won’t have those resources, and they have to know that OU used to have those services but choose to remove them because of everything going on.”
Another OU student, Juan Alonso, also opposes SB1. Alonso is a junior at OU studying computer science, and according to him, the attacks on DEI feel personal as a Hispanic student. “It’s absurd to me that they are banning DEI initiatives at OU because this school is already so predominately white. It’s obvious when walking on campus, and in most of my classes, I’m the only minority (person of color) in the room. It’s not as bad in my computer science classes, but in my other classes, definitely,” said Alonso.
A poll done by Data USA in 2022 found that for the student population at OU’s main campus, 77.7% of students are White, 5.8% are Black, 4.4% are Hispanic, 2.3% are Asian, and 3.5% are two or more races. In numbers, that means that 18,770 White students were admitted compared to 1,434 Black students and 1,060 Hispanic students admitted to OU in 2022.
Alonso also commented on the loss of DEI scholarships, something which Ohio University had already phased out in summer of 2023. According to Alonso, he held a scholarship with DEI requirements his freshman year, and was upset when the scholarship was canceled after his first year, leaving him to pay more for school at OU than he had expected, “When I lost my scholarship I thought maybe it was due to my grades or something, but then I found out that OU had banned DEI scholarships after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action. .. That just shows how it’s not just Trump or SB1 hurting minorities; they’re just pieces of the puzzle in this whole shift toward the right wing.”
SB1 is bringing controversy and uncertainty to all Ohio public universities during this time as administrators figure out how to implement these changes. With the bill going into effect June 26th, universities will have half of the summer semester to iron out the details, and then we will have a much clearer understanding as to how this bill will impact daily procedures on campuses. Without official confirmation from the university, OU professors and students will continue to speculate the future of OU under SB1. According to Debatin, “If you talk among colleagues, there's a lot of fear right now, and people really feeling that they are personally under attack if they continue to do what they're doing, not because they indoctrinate, not because they're biased, not because they have some woke ideology, but simply because they teach in fields that are currently under attack, and that's really horrible.”