Trustees from Ohio's 26 public colleges and universities will meet in Columbus Thursday for the state's annual trustees conference hosted by the Ohio Department of Education.
The conference is an annual event, but this year, trustees will get a rundown on how to properly comply with Ohio's Senate Bill 1. That's the higher education law implemented this summer, which bans DEI programs at public universities and imposes restrictions on faculty.
Gov. Mike DeWine will address the trustees along with the bill's main architect, Jerry Cirino, and Ohio House Finance Committee Chair Brian Stewart.
Confusion and inconsistencies
Ahead of the meeting, faculty and students at the University of Cincinnati held a demonstration on campus to mourn what they say is the death of academic freedom.
Demonstrators laid out a casket and held wanted poster signs featuring the faces of university President Neville Pinto and Board of Trustees Chair Monica Turner, who they say did not stand up for the rights of the campus community.
Mel Searle, UC student and vice president of the LGBTQ+ student group Alliance Cincinnati, says the university's trustees should allocate more time listening to the concerns of the campus community rather than lawmakers.
"It seems that the trustees are that much more willing to listen to our politicians who have not stepped foot in a classroom in decades than they are to listen to our students who have tried to meet with them," Searle said.
Campus protesters confronted Pinto and the Board earlier this year, before the law went into effect, to ask university leaders not to be overly compliant with the law, which was being interpreted differently by universities across the state. Students and faculty claim lawmakers' inability to define DEI has caused confusion and inconsistencies across campuses.
The University of Cincinnati closed and renamed some of its campus centers serving women, Black, and LGBTQ+ students ahead of the fall semester.
At Ohio State University, school leaders banned students from writing messages on the ground with chalk and banned the use of most land acknowledgements, citing compliance with Senate Bill 1, despite the law not specifically prohibiting them. Other public universities have not imposed such bans, and Miami University — which operates the Myaamia Center in collaboration with its namesake, the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma — says it doesn't plan to ban land acknowledgements.
Read more:
