Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
The GOP-controlled Ohio legislature is prepping to fast-track a sweeping higher education reform bill that would, among other things, attempt to combat perceived liberal bias on college campuses by blocking universities from offering diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
On Wednesday, House and Senate proponents touted the so-called “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act” while a dozen or so college students chanted “Higher ed will be dead” in the halls of the Ohio Statehouse.
While the new legislation is largely a rehashing of the much-discussed Senate Bill 83, which failed last year, the new all-out ban on DEI added rancor to an already contentious proposal.
“We are banning DEI entirely in our institutions of higher learning,” Senate Bill 1 sponsor Sen. Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, told reporters at a press conference. “It has become institutionalized discrimination paid for by the taxpayers.”
Under S.B. 1’s framework, public universities would be barred from any mandatory training or orientation involving DEI; blocked from opening new DEI departments and required to dissolve current DEI offices; and prohibited from offering “advantages (or disadvantages) to faculty, staff or students regarding admissions, promotions, tenure or working conditions based on race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression,” among other things.
S.B. 1 also gives the state the ability to withhold certain funds from any university unwilling to comply with S.B. 1’s DEI prohibitions, Cirino said.
