The Ohio Republican Party’s candidate for governor, biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, says he loves Ohio’s state universities and colleges.
But some say he sure has a funny way of showing it.
Ramaswamy, in a video posted by his own campaign on Threads, said there are too many of them and raised the specter of closing or consolidating some of them.
“I want us to have the best universities,” Ramaswamy said in the video. “We have too many of them. They need to be consolidated.
"And when you consolidate them, they can actually be centers of excellence, who actually are the best in their respective domains, instead of trying to create replicas and clones of one another throughout the state.”
That statement pricked up the ears of state university administrators from Ashtabula to Cincinnati and everywhere in between, puzzled by how eliminating state universities — which are not only educational assets but economic drivers in nearly every part of the state — would be a wise decision.
As far as his contention that Ohio universities have created “clones of one another throughout the state,” anyone who has been to both Bowling Green State University and Ohio University knows those schools are as different as night and day.
This video doesn’t have a time stamp on it, but it was likely done in Wapakoneta, as Ramaswamy mentions being in the western Ohio hometown of astronaut Neil Armstrong. And it was probably long before Ramaswamy became a candidate for governor.
The video was not unearthed by some dogged reporter or whistleblower.
It was posted by Ramaswamy’s own campaign staff, making it fair game for any critic of the GOP candidate — most notably Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor.
“I paid my way through Youngstown State and went on to teach at OSU,” Acton, the former Ohio director of Public Health, said on X. “Ohio has the best colleges in the country, and Vivek Ramaswamy plans to get rid of them.”
Michael McGovern, president of Innovation Ohio, a progressive advocacy organization, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer that Ramaswamy’s video musings about school consolidation shows the GOP candidate is out of touch with Ohio voters.
“It’s offensive for him to be saying that all of these are one and the same, and that we need to be cutting higher education instead of doubling down, investing more in our amazing state colleges and universities to make sure we’re producing the sort of talent that we need to grow Ohio’s economy,” McGovern said.
There has been talk of trimming down Ohio’s university system in an era of declining enrollment at many schools, but no one has ever gone as far as Ramaswamy in suggesting that universities and colleges be consolidated.
In 2015, then-Gov. John Kasich had a task force on college affordability. One of its recommendations was for the universities and colleges to consider programs that are duplicated at other colleges and universities in their geographic area. But it was just that — a recommendation.
Last fall, Ramaswamy had to walk back a video in which he proposed a 365-day public school year, with classes running from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. That proposal was met with so much derision and angry opposition that he immediately yanked it off his campaign site.
This week, Ramaswamy’s campaign was busy trying to walk back his video on consolidating universities. The job fell to campaign press secretary Evan Machan.
"Amy Acton is lying again, no surprises there,” Machan said in a written statement. “Vivek is obviously not going to eliminate Ohio’s great universities, but he will cut the bureaucracy that burdens them. College tuition costs are more unaffordable than ever, and Vivek won’t apologize for delivering solutions to fix that problem for Ohio families. Vivek has laid out a plan to create centers of excellence in higher education, while Amy Acton offers absolutely nothing, as usual."
Nonetheless, the candidate says something entirely different in the video, which — and we can’t stress this enough — was posted on Threads by the Ramaswamy campaign itself. You can’t get that toothpaste back in the tube.
Sorry, in politics as in a china shop business, if you broke it, you bought it.
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