Senate Bill 1, a bill Ohio Republicans say will stop liberal indoctrination at universities, was passed 21-to-11 in the Ohio Senate on Wednesday.
The Advance Ohio Higher Education Act proposes a ban on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives for Ohio’s public universities, a new mandatory civics course and prohibits university faculty from striking.
The bill was introduced by Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), who introduced a similar bill under the same name in 2023. That piece of legislation, Senate Bill 83, also passed the senate, but was never voted on in the house.
Fourteen people testified in support of Senate Bill 1. Proponents for the bill included a representative from the National Association of Scholars, which is a member of the advisory board for Project 2025, a representative from the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank whose chair, Linda McMahon is nominated for U.S. Secretary of Education, and Do No Harm Action, a medical and policy advocacy group that opposes DEI practices in medical education and gender affirming care for minors.
More than 200 people showed up Tuesday to oppose the bill during the Senate's Higher Education Committee meeting. The hearing lasted more than eight hours, with each speaker limited to around three minutes. More than 600 additional people submitted written testimony opposing the bill.
Among those who testified against the bill were several members of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).
“By making this bill Senate Bill 1, the senate majority has said that the top priority for them is this anti-higher education bill,” said Sara Kilpatrick, executive director of the AAUP Ohio Conference. “This is a bill that will harm our public institutions of higher education in the state of Ohio, which are a huge economic driver, not only in their communities, but for the entire state.”
The bill would also ban a university from endorsing or opposing “controversial beliefs.” Examples listed in the bill's text are “climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
The version of Senate Bill 1 that passed also said staff and faculty would be mandated to “allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies” and to “not seek to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious point of view.”
“Controversial beliefs” would also be banned from job listings by universities.
Students have expressed concern that this part of the bill could shut down diversity and inclusion centers like Ohio University’s Pride Center, Women’s Center, and Multicultural Center.
Kilpatrick is also concerned that this aspect of the bill would limit a union’s ability to bargain for protections in their contracts.
“It prohibits faculty unions from bargaining over certain subjects, and these are subjects that are fundamental to the terms and conditions of faculty employment. And so we see this as union busting because they're trying to say that faculty cannot bargain over these key terms,” she said.
The bill would also prohibit university faculty from striking. The law would add public university faculty to a list of employee groups who are not allowed to strike, including police officers and firefighters.
“We hardly ever see faculty go on strike, but they don't like the fact that faculty even have that leverage in collective bargaining negotiations,” Kilpatrick said. “It is a fundamental human right to withhold your labor if you are not being treated fairly, and this is an attack on all workers by trying to silence their voices.”
Another part of the bill is also directed at faculty, with guidelines on how universities should perform faculty evaluations. The bill also mandates the addition of the question “Does the faculty member create a classroom atmosphere free of political, racial, gender, and religious bias?”
This section of the bill also introduces what the bill calls “post-tenure review.” If a tenured faculty member receives a “does not meet performance expectations” evaluation in two out of three consecutive years, then the review process is triggered, which could lead to the termination of the tenured faculty member.
Kilpatrick is wary of this section as well. “There is specific language that allows for what they're calling post-tenure review, but is actually termination review because they want to allow certain administrators to call for post-tenure review at any time,” she said. “Firing faculty without any sort of due process, that's not real tenure. They're saying that they don't want to eliminate tenure, but this in effect eliminates meaningful tenure in the state of Ohio.”
“Tenure would exist in name only,” she added.
The bill also mandates the creation of an “American Civic Literacy” course. The course would be three credit hours and require students to be taught founding documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. The course would be mandatory for all students to graduate with an undergraduate degree, unless a student has AP or CCP credit that covers the materials taught in the course.
Kilpatrick believes that the bill is the result of inflammatory rhetoric against university professors. “For decades now, there have been some on the right who have perpetuated this myth that college and university professors are all liberal and they're indoctrinating students. And of course, they have supplied absolutely no proof that that is the case,” she said.
“What you're hearing in support of this bill is a lot of anecdotes, some people that have had bad personal experiences, but you can't extrapolate those bad individual experiences as widespread problems,” Kilpatrick added. “We're concerned that they're responding to a limited set of problems and in turn they're going to put this kind of blanket overhaul on higher education that's going to do a lot more harm than good.”
