A chilling effect has fallen over Ohio’s public college campuses. Both faculty and students are mincing their words in class and approaching their discussions with caution for fear of being reported, said Wright State University junior Rochelle Woodson. The state’s newly enacted education overhaul bill is to blame.
“In my in-person classes, there’s this tension of what they can and can’t say, [and] then we have a code of ethics to follow,” said Woodson, whose social work program’s embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion is at odds with the law. “Prior, I feel like my professors taught very [openly] and there were no questions, hidden tones.”
Nearly a month has passed since students returned for the 2025-26 academic year, and already some say they’re reeling from the effects of Senate Bill 1. The GOP-sponsored legislation, which eliminated diversity, equity and inclusion programs, scholarships and policies from public universities, among other measures, took effect in late June after a grassroots campaign to put its potential repeal to a vote in November failed.
A number of institutions had started complying with the bill months ahead of SB 1’s enactment, shuttering campus identity centers, terminating DEI staff and eliminating degree programs. Since returning to campus in August, students from universities across the state told Salon that they’ve lost much-valued support, funding and scholarships, and freedom to express themselves under SB 1. Some also fear the legislation will serve as a model for other states across the country, as GOP-led efforts to axe DEI provisions, sanitize U.S. history and reshape higher education through an ultraconservative lens take hold in places like Florida and Oklahoma.
Woodson said the bill has created a culture of self-censorship in her classes, threatened the accreditation of her program, and cheapened her academic experience.
“It definitely just feels like we have to tiptoe around things, which I think gets in the way of having productive conversations in class,” Woodson said. Students hesitate before volunteering their opinions in class, while faculty appear more cautious, even including disclaimers in their syllabi. “There’s this clear thing of ‘Can we talk about this? Like, am I going to be stepping on toes?”
SB 1, also known as the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, is a sprawling statute that Republicans billed as fostering academic freedom on the state’s college campuses. The bill regulates classroom discussions on “controversial beliefs” like immigration, closes campus identity centers for marginalized students and evaluates professors on students’ opinions of whether they created an unbiased classroom environment.
“Our Founders treasured diversity of thought so highly they made free speech our very first guaranteed right,” said state Sen. Jerry Cirino, the Republican lawmaker who authored the bill, in a January news release. “It’s time to bring that right back to campus.”
Its passage in late March — and swift authorization by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine a few days later — was enough to convince then-Cleveland State University student Dylan Repertorio to make his exit. He told Salon that he transferred to a university in Albany, New York, because he saw how the law would limit courses in foreign policy and political science that he was interested in, diminish the quality of his education and strip students of support systems.
“Part of the reason why I left as a whole was [because] my degree is not going to be worth as much,” Repertorio, now a junior studying emergency management and homeland security at another institution he declined to name, said in an interview. “I’m not going to be able to learn the things I want to learn when I’m paying for my degree. But also, why would I contribute to an economy in a state that doesn’t care about me? Why am I here?”
Repertorio said that the bill does the opposite of what Cirino claimed, “resulting in less freedom” for students. He believes such legislation will spread to other states as GOP lawmakers across the country, with help from the Trump administration’s pressuring of universities, attempt to push the boundaries of higher education further.
“If they could do this to higher education, it’s going to spread into other parts of people’s lives,” he said.
At The Ohio State University in Columbus, changes came as early as February, a preemptive response to both the expected passage of the legislation and the Trump administration’s executive orders on campus antisemitism and DEI that threatened universities’ research funding. The university has shuttered its Center for Belonging and Social Change and eliminated DEI offices and staff. Most recently, the school has banned students from writing on university sidewalks with chalk — a move critics believe is meant to quell pro-Palestinian speech on campus — and decorating their residence hall floors with a non-OSU-theme.
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Eloni McClain, a pre-law junior studying neuroscience at OSU, said that while not directly impacted, she feels that her instructors can no longer openly discuss the scientific contributions of women and people of color, or “equality in science” without fear of repercussions, a huge loss — one coupled with the Black Student Association losing funding and the CBSC closing.
“It just feels like there’s less safe spaces for students to go to based on their identity,” McClain said.
The bill passed the Ohio Legislature despite receiving a record number of opposing testimonies, prompting faculty at Youngstown State University to lead a seven-week, statewide legislative effort to put the future of the bill to a vote this November. The petition team fell short of the roughly 250,000 signatures needed to pass the ballot referendum — garnering just over 195,000 signatures — and the bill went into effect.
While those faculty members told Salon at the time that they would not be changing anything about how they do their jobs, students have noticed the changes to DEI policy YSU made to comply.
“On the first day, [in] every class I went to, a professor had to give a disclaimer, saying that they’re not trying to indoctrinate us or force us to believe anything,” said Samantha George, a senior at YSU. “And that was something that never really had to happen prior to this.”
George, who’s majoring in English education, told Salon her program’s been hard hit. Some of her professors appear nervous to speak too much or share a stance in their classes as they had before SB 1. Plus, the university has nixed what was once a required class on diversity and equity in the classroom from the program altogether, she said. A YSU lecturer separately confirmed that the class had been pulled. She also worries about how these rollbacks will affect her future as a teacher because nothing is stopping lawmakers from also attempting to extend such limitations to K-12 education.
“All it really feels like is them trying to restrict education to the people they think deserve it,” George said. “Removing DEI and all these other things that ensure people who maybe wouldn’t have the chance to get an education actually can go get one — it just feels like they’re trying to make education so inaccessible that people just can’t do it.”
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Nica Delgado, a graduate student of library science at Kent State University, told Salon that it feels like SB 1 has stolen “a lot of joy” from the campus. She and other students are feeling the absence of Hispanic Heritage Month events, chatter about the LGBTQ+ center’s rainbow run and the now-closed Multicultural Center’s annual kickoff that would have otherwise happened.
“It feels really lifeless and exclusionary, and the love that those centers had for their students — that love hasn’t found its place back to campus yet,” she said in an interview. “As someone who is so involved with the Multicultural Center, it kills me. It breaks my heart.”
Delgado said she lost a world of support she’d fostered in the Multicultural Center as an undergrad, including Cupida Transiciones, a program for incoming college students of color. SB 1 has also eliminated scholarships she had planned to apply for to offset the cost of her master’s degree, forcing her to take out a $20,000 loan after previously completing her bachelor’s at the institution debt-free.
“The legislators that pushed this through took something from our students in Ohio that they will never understand, and they took programs from us that truly saved lives and kept people in school,” Delgado, president of the Kent State Ohio Student Association, said.
“It’s doing such a disservice to history, and it’s doing a disservice to the future of Ohio,” she added.
