When Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech billionaire who is the Republican candidate For Ohio governor, called for shutting down some of Ohio’s public universities, it created a maelstrom of outright anger around the state.
And now he finds himself where he is torn between defending his plan one day and running away from it the next.
Ohio voters who pay attention are no doubt scratching their heads over these political gymnastics.
It’s reminiscent of early in Ramaswamy’s candidacy when he had to walk back his idea of a 365-day school year for Ohio’s public elementary and secondary schools.
Absolutely nobody liked that idea. Not the parents, not the teachers or school administrators, and certainly not kids.
Ramaswamy threw that idea overboard in record time.
David Niven, political science professor at the University of Cincinnati and a consultant on Democratic campaigns, summed up the pickle Ramaswamy finds himself in.
“There's an expression — when you get on the wrong train, get off at the first stop,” Niven said. “Ramaswamy seems to have misunderstood this lesson.”
What Ramaswamy has said about Ohio colleges in the past
Earlier this year, Ramaswamy’s own campaign posted a 2025 speech in which he explicitly called for consolidating some of Ohio’s public universities and colleges to save money and eliminate duplicative programs.
"Look at the number of universities in our state. I love universities in Ohio, I want us to have the best universities, but we have too many of them," he said. "They need to be consolidated, and when you consolidate them, they can actually be centers of excellence, the best in their respective domains, instead of trying to create replicas and clones of one another throughout the state."
Then in a March 2026 opinion column in the Columbus Dispatch, he named schools he believes could be closed: Cleveland State University, the University of Akron, Kent State University and Central State University, an HBCU school.
The reaction to that was overwhelmingly negative — not just from college administrators but from many of his fellow Republicans who don’t fancy the idea of shutting down the four-year colleges in their areas.
"I don't know how much he knows about how higher ed works," Ohio Senate Senator and Finance Chair Jerry Cirino told a reporter in June.
At a press conference on higher education, I asked Senate Finance Chair Jerry Cirino about GOP gov. nominee Vivek Ramaswamy's comments about shutting down universities like Kent, CSU, UA.
— Morgan Trau (@MorganTrau) June 24, 2026
"I don't know how much he knows about how higher ed. works."@WEWS @WCPO @OhioCapJournal pic.twitter.com/Kajn84Twz1
Republicans and Democrats agree that such a rollback would force students in their areas to go to schools far from their homes and add the cost of room and board to the expense of their college educations.
"It's important to have them all over the state so frankly, people who can't afford to live at the college and pay room and board, they can commute. We still have commuters," current Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine told the Statehouse News Bureau.
The backlash to what Ramaswamy proposed has been strong and consistent; it has forced the GOP candidate to back-track to the extent that he can, and claim his plan was misunderstood.
What he's saying now
We wanted to speak with Ramaswamy in hopes that he could sort out what seems to be inconsistent statements on the higher education issue. But his campaign press secretary did not respond to our request for an interview.
At a town hall event in the Cleveland suburb of Strongsville on Friday, Ramaswamy claimed he never wanted to shut down universities, but rather close programs within the colleges.
“I think that we have too many duplicative programs in our universities,” Ramaswamy said, according to News 5 Cleveland. “When I look at a region, I want to look at Ohio in terms of regions like regional governance; I want every region to have the best higher education institutions available for people in that region. But not every university needs to offer every program.”
David B. Cohen, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron — one of the schools Ramaswamy says could be eliminated — said the GOP candidate “has no idea what that would cost, in terms of job in Ohio.”
According to the Inter-University Council of Ohio, exactly 866,782 jobs in the state depend on Ohio's university system.
That’s one in every eight jobs in the state.
“The things he is saying are really harmful to Ohio,” Cohen said. “It’s clear to me that he really doesn’t care about Ohio. He simply wants to be governor.”
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