Last Friday, on March 28th, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed Senate Bill 1, titled the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” into law. Scheduled to go into effect 90 days after DeWine’s signature, the bill will prohibit diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts without written permission from the Ohio Chancellor of Higher Education. It will also ban any courses that are found to indoctrinate students about “controversial beliefs,” 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.” Under this bill, Ohio’s higher education landscape will be subjected to an unprecedented level of broad and sweeping state scrutiny and regulatory power. For all people living in Ohio, it will not take long to see firsthand the deleterious impact that this localized reflection of the fascist turn in our national politics will have.
Although the Education Act only pertains to Ohio’s state institutions, leadership throughout our state, including those in private institutions, will reckon with these implications. Weeks ahead of Gov. DeWine’s signature, Ohio State University dissolved its DEI office weeks later. This happened despite hundreds of student activists protesting their administration. Those students delivered an apt characterization of the decision when they stated that their board chose “comfortable cowardice choosing safety for yourselves at the cost of [their] students.” Our own administration has demonstrated similar traits already, most recently when they capitulated to our state’s abhorrent bathroom bill earlier this year before it even became enforceable. With our state lawmakers mobilizing their agenda, our leaders continue to skirt their responsibility to stand up in bold resistance for us. Regardless of the specific communities we are part of, this attack on public university’s DEI offices implicates all of us in Oberlin.
Many of us owe our place in Oberlin’s community — to some extent — to the support of DEI initiatives. Integral pipelines like the Multicultural Visiting Program and the Posse Program have been pivotal in breaking the tradition of colleges and universities excluding students who aren’t white men. The floodgates have opened, and institutions like Oberlin are currently feeling new pressure to close them. National studies about how college admission rates were impacted by the Supreme Court’s outlawing of affirmative action have already shown significant drops in the rate of Black student acceptance. It is still too early to see the specific long-term impacts of these compounding effects — last year’s Supreme Court ruling, the Education Act, the Bathroom Bill, and inevitably more to come — but students will begin to see firsthand our community atrophy.
On an abstract level, these are the troubling steps toward fascist repression of free expression and intellectual curiosity. The bill’s wording is intentionally vague, empowering Ohio’s legislature to crack down on curricula that they find discomforting and disagreeable. Teachers of all disciplines will no longer feel safe attempting to foster open and honest dialogues at the risk of angering a student and drawing the ire of conservative lawmakers. Once again, this bill targeting public colleges and universities has a chilling effect that will impact all institutions statewide.
A critical threshold has been crossed in which teachers can no longer provide holistic education with the potential to inspire liberatory moments of personal development. Activists at Oberlin have long been fighting to transform the classroom into a space where students are able to not only learn, but apply those skills and history to their identities and values. An education, free of restrictions and repression, allows students to articulate the injustice occurring around the world, and develop tools to counter it. It is through arduous and uncomfortable dialogues that we develop the practical tools to elevate ourselves from traditional patterns and practices that perpetuate the injustices that we proclaim to stand against. This higher education bill is a bold attempt to curtail our education, which is one of the most essential steps of the process to transform our ideas into direct action.
If we legitimize this bill, we are telling our legislators that it is okay to dictate on an interpersonal level what is and is not permissible to openly and honestly discuss. This bill is fascistic at its root because it transgresses the fundamental pillar of democracy, which is the right to express any ideas or opinions about any subject matter freely. When we are obstructed from exercising this right within spaces of intellectual freedom, then we are no longer part of a community that values freedom and personal flourishing. Instead, we begin to live under the authority of a powerful minority where their will alone dictates what is right or wrong. Anyone remotely invested in preserving the sanctity of a few fundamental principles that ensure all of us are afforded an inviolable right to being a free person must stand now against this bill.
Our recent history has shown us that we cannot rely on the members of leadership within our institutions to protect us from brazen attacks on our right to full personhood. Without our voices, powerful enough to overwhelm the pressure being instilled from above by conservative authoritarian lawmakers, we will soon find ourselves living a reality that is strikingly unfamiliar to our present and recent past that we currently take for granted. Students and all of our community members can take tangible, concrete steps to keep all of us from being trampled over. We implore all of you to join the mass mobilization events organized nationwide, including here at Oberlin. Play a small part in student-led collectives that are invested in organizing direct action campaigns. It is hard to sustain consistent involvement in political activism. But with every passing day, the potential reality that you could help us stave off makes overcoming those burdens more worthwhile.
