On March 28, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed into law Senate Bill 1, which enacts the Advance Ohio Education Act. This sweeping set of regulations placed on all Ohio public universities includes restrictions on teaching, hiring, and student life, centered around ending programs related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in education. While S.B. 1 will not directly affect private institutions like Oberlin, some faculty worry about the law’s effect on academic freedom in the state, as well as implications for the future. 

Specifics of the bill include prohibitions on the use of DEI principles in hiring or training and restrictions on the teaching of “controversial topics,” especially those related to race and sex. The bill also creates new systems to supervise administration and teaching at the state level. It lays out broad standards for what the legislature sees as an appropriate degree of freedom of thought in instruction and in the classroom, as well as creates a structure where the faculty will be regularly reviewed by their students, their college or university’s administration, and by the state of Ohio in terms of adhering to these standards. The bill also states that the college or university could itself lose funding if its faculty are found to be in violation of S.B. 1’s requirements. 

Some critics of the bill believe that the combination of extensive standards and heavy methods of regulation will serve to restrict what is discussed in the classroom overall. Critics also believe that removing what the bill labels DEI policies will be a loss to both academic communities and individual students. 

Professor of Africana Studies Charles Peterson expressed disappointment with the bill. 

“The passage of S.B. 1 is one of the most destructive pieces of legislation possible for Ohio education,” Peterson wrote in a statement to the Review. “It attempts to erase policies of inclusion, support, and recognition that contribute to stronger curricula, learning environments and economic potential. Its attacks on faculty freedom means that faculty will work in unstable work environments, fearful of their job security and what they say and write. For students, it will narrow their learning environment through the exclusion of a variety of students from broad backgrounds and experiences, whose contributions enlarge the world in which we live. It will close the mind[s] of Ohio students by narrowing the world as they understand it.”

The bill also ends the right of faculty to go on strike as a form of collective bargaining, which Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics Kirk Ormand believes will further decrease the quality of public universities in Ohio by driving away professors. 

“I believe that the best, and therefore most mobile, professors in public universities in Ohio will now actively seek employment in other states — where they still have academic freedom, where tenure still protects them from political interference into their teaching and research, and where they are treated as valued public employees,” Ormand wrote in a statement to the Review. “This will cause a ‘brain drain’ that will have devastating effects for Ohio’s public higher education system.” 

While Oberlin will not feel the direct effects of the bill, some faculty worry about threats to academic freedom here and at other private Ohio institutions due to anticipatory adherence.

“I hope to see Oberlin’s leadership defend vulnerable members of our community, be they students or staff or faculty or other residents of the City of Oberlin,” Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature Claire Solomon, OC ’98, wrote in a statement to the Review. “I hope to see Oberlin defend academic freedom, and not fire faculty for saying things S.B. 1 has decided are ‘controversial.’ And I hope Oberlin faculty will be courageous enough to speak up and show up when our conscience demands it.”