With Senate Bill 1, the state would ban universities from taking a stand on “controversial beliefs”—including climate change, immigration, gay marriage, and abortion.
A student holds a sign during a pro-DEI protest at the University of Cincinnati’s Bearcat Commons on March 4, 2025.
(Brooklyn Noe)
As for many queer people, college was an opportunity for Eddy Risimini to escape his conservative upbringing. “UC was the ultimate freedom for me,” said Risimini, a 19-year-old trans man from Kentucky and a student at the University of Cincinnati. “No one would know what my deadname was, I could fully start over and be seen as a man, and I could start my medical transition,” Risimini added. “UC gave me and other trans people accommodations to live on gender-neutral floors, and overall, I have not experienced any harassment from others because of my identity.”
Then Senate Bill 104—which bans trans students from using restrooms matching their gender identity and colleges from constructing all-gender bathrooms—was signed by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Suddenly, the atmosphere on Risimini’s campus began to change. Risimini and the rest of the residents of the gender-neutral floor at Siddall Hall received an e-mail from the Department of Resident Education & Development. “A colleague from our LGBTQ Center and I would like to invite you into a conversation regarding upcoming changes to the residential experience,” the message read. “We had the option to stay in our current arrangement and risk being reported for using the ‘wrong’ restroom and facing a court hearing for breaking the code of conduct, or we could be relocated to an apartment,” Risimini said. “Every single trans person on my floor moved out.”
UC quickly put up new bathroom signage. In Sidall Hall and Calhoun Hall, restrooms were now for “Biological Men” and “Biological Women.” After considerable public pushback, including protests across campus, the university apologized for the signs and promised to change them. Students have since taken down most of the signs and they have not yet been replaced.
“I think to say it is an error and to only change a small aspect of the law and not others is petty at best, but I believe that it still matters,” said Risimini. “My question is why stop at changing only the terminology? Why not try to push back against discrimination and protect the students living at their university?”
Simone Balachandran, an associate professor in environmental engineering, has made waves on social media by publicly following the new bathroom rules, highlighting the absurdity of these new laws and bathroom policing generally for trans people. More than that, Balachandran believes this bill is being used to instill fear and humiliation—feelings she refuses to give into. “I can flip the script and say, ‘well, I’m gonna go to the locker room, and I’m gonna have faith in men,’ and by doing that, and by knowing that these different body parts—boobs, vaginas, and penises—are gonna be in the same room, we’re gonna move to a gender neutral bathroom,” Balachandran said.
But Senate Bill 104 is not the only legislation introduced in Ohio to reshape academia statewide. Senate Bill 1 would ban faculty strikes along with DEI offices and scholarships, and prohibit universities from taking a stand on “controversial beliefs”—including climate change, immigration, gay marriage, and abortion. The Trump administration recently issued an executive order that would eradicate federal funding for colleges that promote DEI policies, though that order has been blocked by a judge.
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“Our leaders have begun evaluating jobs and duties related to DEI and examining our DEI programming, initiatives, and projects to bring all areas into compliance, wrote University of Cincinnati president Neville Pinto in a statement from February 21. “In addition, we have begun removing references to DEI principles across university websites, social media, and collateral materials.”
“There will be no diversity at all,” said Uzoma Fah, a sophomore and nursing student at the University of Cincinnati. Fah is also a Darwin T. Turner Scholar, a scholarship benefiting students of color and first-generation students that may be eliminated if Senate Bill 1 is passed. “I wouldn’t have gone to college if they didn’t cover everything,” said Fah. “A lot of people in Turner, they have other scholarships as well that are funded by DEI, so this is impacting us like crazy.”
“All of the changes that are being made to the programs that support [marginalized] students across the university are just going to make it much harder for our students to finish their degrees,” said Susan Gregson, an associate professor of Middle Childhood Education at the University of Cincinnati. With these laws in place, fewer young people will want to attend university in Ohio, she says, and youth in the state might finish their degrees elsewhere. “I think Ohio’s ability to attract young faculty, Ohio’s ability to grow our own teachers, to have students want to come to Ohio to get their education…is certainly going to be much less attractive.”
“I’m very scared that my program is going to lose a good chunk of what makes it special,” said Claire Coles, a freshman English major. “There’s queer theory, there’s critical theory…classes I haven’t even gotten to take yet, and I was looking forward to them, and I’m worried they’re just not gonna exist anymore.”
Senate Bill 1 is supported by conservative think tanks, including the National Association of Scholars, which sits on the advisory board of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Supporters claim the bill will encourage merit-based decision-making and political acceptance. George W. Dent, a professor at Case Western and a member of the National Association of Scholars’ Board of Directors, called diversity, equity, and inclusion programs “a tool for racial and political discrimination.”
“Maybe the way to do it is one blockbuster bill and go for broke,” wrote Richard Vedder, an economics professor and NAS board member in an e-mail from April 2023 obtained by The Nation through a public record request. Vedder expressed frustration that the bill may need to be shortened. “Engaging in political warfare simultaneously on multiple fronts may be similar to doing the same thing militarily.” While the version of the bill—Senate Bill 83—was reduced in size, nearly everything removed from it would eventually be included in Senate Bill 1.
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It’s impossible for university presidents to remove DEI themselves, because “any such effort would encounter widespread opposition,” Dent wrote. “Any president must realize that ending DEI would result in broad hostility to him and make it hard to accomplish much.” By making DEI removal mandatory, Senate Bill 1 “frees presidents of an impossible burden,” he said.
During a text exchange in January with Richard Vedder, Senator Cirino dismissed concerns about Senate Bill 1. “The bill looks great but the bad guys are gonna go nuts!” Vedder wrote. “Let them eat cake!” Senator Cirino replied.
More than 800 people submitted opposition testimony to Senator Cirino’s bill. “Before DEI and CRT, it was cancel culture, before that it was political correctness, before that it was identity politics,” said Laura Lassabe Shepard, author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America. “The right has always had some niche academic-sounding concept that they try to vilify and demonize because the general public may not be familiar with it.”
In Shepard’s view, attacks on DEI, CRT, and other inclusive policies are part of a wider effort to defund and capture American education, with influencers like Christopher Rufo and think tanks like NAS and the Heritage Foundation providing arguments and resources to justify stifling academic freedom.
“It’s for bigger goals, right?,” said Shepard. “The purpose of these think tanks is to gin up the pseudoscience or gin up more rhetoric and make it sound academic, make it sound like there are legitimate reasons to delegitimize teaching about race, and it can translate to legislation, and it’s all legible and it sounds very reasonable,” Shepard added. “The pattern is the same: to vilify an academic concept, to use that as justification to defund public education writ large, not just K-12 but also higher ed.” The transformation of higher education, and the defunding of K-12 in favor of privatization and vouchers, will make education unattainable for many people, Shepard says, and lead to a less-informed electorate. “People who don’t understand the way the world works are people who consent to authoritarian takeovers.”
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