Senate Bill 1, the new extensive law overhauling programs and practices at Ohio institutions of higher education, is in effect today. A repeal effort that would have stopped till it went before voters it fell short.
It’s a letdown for a cohort of grassroots volunteers who had been collecting signatures to try and overturn the law through a ballot referendum this year.
Led by unionized faculty at Youngstown State University, more than 1,700 volunteers collected nearly 195,000 signatures following Gov. Mike DeWine’s signature of SB 1, said Amanda Fehlbaum, director of the Department of Women’s Gender and Studies. They needed more than 248,000 valid signatures to qualify for the fall 2025 election.
“We raised over $43,000. Our largest donation was $1,000. Small dollar donations. There’s no dark money here,” Fehlbaum said Thursday at a news conference. “It was just a matter of not having enough time.”
With 90 days between the governor’s signature and the bill’s effective date, and students off for the summer, the timeline was tough. Cryshanna Jackson Leftwich, a professor of public affairs and politics, said she knew they were going to face formidable hurdles.
“It shouldn’t take millions of dollars to fight democracy. It shouldn’t take millions of dollars to consultants and lawyers for average voting citizens to say, ‘Hey, this is an unjust bill and we know that,’” Jackson Leftwich said Thursday.
SB 1 gets rid of most mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion—colloquially, DEI—training at public universities and colleges, requires so-called “intellectual diversity” on certain subjects, and slashes university trustee terms. It also bans faculty strikes, mandates their post-tenure performance reviews and requires a civics course focused on United States history and the free market, among other measures.
Its passage came at the protest of Democratic lawmakers and hundreds of opponents, who turned out in droves to testify and demonstrate against the bill and its earlier iterations. Some begged DeWine to veto SB 1, but he signed it within 48 hours of receiving it.
Controversial state laws often face challenges in court, but so far, nobody has sued over SB 1 either.
