While Connecticut lawmakers have prioritized investments in students under the leading proposal, Senate Bill 1, legislators in Ohio have drafted their own Senate Bill 1, which focuses instead on attacking diversity and scholarship programs at public colleges and universities.
This legislative session in Connecticut, Senate Bill 1, the top-most priority of the Senate Democratic caucus focuses on universal childcare, engaging disconnected youth and removing funding barriers for our neediest districts.
Several hundred miles away in the Ohio State House, Senate Bill 1 looks quite different. The priority legislation in Columbus takes aim at public colleges and universities by eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and scholarships, as well as curbing professors’ ability to teach about “controversial topics.”
The bill also cracks down on worker’s rights for faculty, prohibiting them from striking and allowing the termination of tenured professors. The legislation has passed the Senate and House and now heads back to Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, for signing, according to the Ohio Capital Journal.
The legislation states that public colleges and universities may not “endorse or oppose, as an institution, any controversial belief or policy, except on matters that directly impact the institution’s funding.”
Under the Ohio bill, controversial belief or policy is defined as “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
This proposal aligns with education trends nationwide that seek to curtail the accurate teaching of American and world history like the Holocaust, slavery and the Civil Rights Movement. PEN America has been tracking these initiatives since 2021 and, in 2024, eight state legislatures enacted what they call “educational gag orders” that restrict teaching of certain subjects in schools. These ideas are being proposed across the country, even here in Connecticut by the Republican party, which holds super-minorities in both legislative chambers.
These ‘forced neutrality’ policies prohibit professors from teaching about theories like institutional racism, the effects of slavery and the era of Jim Crow laws. They can also prevent the teaching of how facism in Germany in the 1930s led to the mass extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, LGBTQ, people with disabilities and Hitler’s political opponents.
The attacks on DEI programs are also not new, but they have far-ranging effects. This legislation would eliminate scholarship opportunities for students from historically disadvantaged communities, and prevent inclusive programming and curriculum.
More than 900 medical students, residents and attending physicians in Ohio signed a letter sharing serious concerns about eliminating DEI programs, according to the Ohio Capital Journal. They worried that eliminating these programs would not allow them to properly prepare to treat all patients.
