Volunteers at Kent State University and the University of Akron are helping gather the needed signatures to get a referendum on the November ballot to overturn Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, which contains sweeping changes meant to combat what its Republican sponsors view as a liberal bias at the state’s colleges and universities.
Deb Smith, the president of Kent State’s American Association of University Professors, the faculty union, said the union reached out to organizers at Youngstown State University, who turned in paperwork that’s the first required step toward trying to repeal the measure with a statewide vote.
The Youngstown State group said it turned in more than 4,500 voter signatures on Monday alongside a summary of SB1 — Gov. Mike DeWine has signed the bill into law, which takes effect in late June.
The signatures will be reviewed by Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose and the summary by Republican Attorney General Dave Yost. Petitioners must follow the state’s complex, multi-step process for placing state referendums before voters.
Smith said she’s confident activists at several Ohio universities will meet the first hurdle of gathering 1,000 verified signatures to submit to the Ohio Secretary of State’s office.
“I don’t think there’s any concern about getting those,” Smith said. “At some point we will succeed in meeting [the] requirements and will move into the second stage, and that’s the more elaborate petition gathering.”
Smith hopes the referendum will eventually overturn the law, given the overwhelming opposition testimony lobbied against SB1 before it was passed by the state legislature. The students she’s spoken with at Kent State have been overwhelmingly — but not universally — supportive of her efforts.
“They’re particularly concerned by the aspect of the bill that bans the university from engaging in any sort of activities that support diversity, equity and inclusion,” Smith said. “They’re also super concerned about the chilling effect that bill will have on the academic freedom of faculty.”
Other policies in SB1 also raise concerns for educators
SB1 would cut DEI programs at universities across Ohio, further enforcing the Trump administration’s mandate that all education institutions end their DEI initiatives. But for Smith, the bill’s DEI policies are not the only alarming issue.
The concern she hears about most frequently from faculty is the requirement that syllabuses be posted on the university’s website.
“This provision of the law seems more or less designed to ensure that people who are not in any way connected to the university can use keywords to search for content that’s being taught that they object to and then file complaints or otherwise harass the faculty members who are teaching that content,” Smith said.
She also noted that faculty at Kent State are upset about the SB1 provision that would require student evaluations of teaching staff to be included in their annual performance reviews. Smith said student evaluations of faculty are inherently biased, with female and Black professors regularly receiving lower marks for the same curricula than their white male counterparts.
The AAUP president at the University of Akron, Toni Bisconti, said university-based support for the SB1 referendum isn’t partisan. She said students and faculty from across the political spectrum are voicing support for it, and that the tools already baked into the higher- education landscape are more than enough to address any concerns that SB1 intends to alleviate.
“This is not the left trying to put forth their own agenda,” Bisconti said. “This is all students, all faculty, all university communities that are saying, ‘You know what, we could do us.’
“We trust our students well enough, we trust our faculty well enough, we trust our internal processes enough to take care of any indoctrination you think is happening.”
Both Bisconti and Smith are concerned about provisions in SB1 that would limit the number of topics faculty unions are allowed to negotiate, including retrenchment, which is the process universities and their faculty unions go through to lay off teaching staff, and the banning of faculty strikes. Similarly, both are concerned about the long-term impacts SB1 could have on Ohio’s ability to retain talent, jobs over the long haul.
“Honestly, it’s terrifying,” Bisconti said. “I’m already losing talent and scholars to other states because of the attacks on tenure by the government and the attacks on our own ability to teach our own subjects.”
Bisconti said smaller state schools such as the University of Akron, Cleveland State University and, to a lesser extent, Kent State, will be hurt more than big schools like Ohio State by students leaving Ohio for universities with fewer governmental restrictions.
“We’re the schools that losing three amazing scholars does long-term damage to our reputation and our programs,” Bisconti said. “… I think we lose major talent, and that talent that goes away certainly isn’t going to come back.”
What does the bill’s author say about the referendum?
Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) has worked on versions of SB1 for the past three years. A version passed out of the Ohio Senate in 2023 but was never brought to the floor for a vote in the House. But now, with the law poised to be implemented in July, he understands there will be some opposition to it.
“[We’re] trying to create and require an environment where public universities and colleges have an environment of diversity of thought,” Cirino told Signal Akron during a phone interview. “We need to get back to that. That’s the overarching thing I’m trying to accomplish with Senate Bill 1.”
The primary ways he said the bill does this is by getting rid of DEI policies and removing the “litmus test” for hiring faculty that was used to ensure potential faculty member’s politics aligned with the broader ideals of the university.
He defended the clause in the law that would prohibit unionized faculty from striking because it would violate the “contract” students sign with universities for uninterrupted classroom instruction.
“Unions have a right to organize and have an agreement, they can look out for themselves and they should,” Cirino said. ”I’m not against labor, at all. But, we have limits.”
That strike prohibition, along with the changes to retrenchment, are particularly problematic issues to faculty members helping with the referendum issues. Taken in totality, these faculty members said the changes to higher education in Ohio will exacerbate the “brain drain” the state has experienced.
Cirino, the first in his family to go to college, isn’t worried about that. He said the diversity of thought and removal of DEI policies will attract more students to Ohio’s public universities.
“I want every child in Ohio to choose whatever post-secondary education they want,” he said. “… I want everybody to have that choice. But I don’t want other people to have a better chance than somebody else because of the color of their skin.”
Signal Statewide Reporter Andrew Tobias contributed to this reporting.
