On March 19, the Ohio House of Representatives threatened to undermine Ohio’s public higher education system by passing Senate Bill 1 (SB 1), sponsored by State Sen. Jerry Cirino. Its passage in the Senate followed by Governor Mike DeWine’s signature on the bill would deeply injure a system that enrolls roughly 430,000 students and includes institutions of national and global prestige. Ohio should be proud of its public universities, which provide world-class education and produce Ohio’s talent and civic leadership. Instead, the Republican Party and Cirino resent Ohio’s universities and seek to mold them into their vision by undermining academic freedom. Because universities are loci of knowledge, innovation and leadership, SB 1 threatens Ohio’s future economic and social prosperity. Beyond Ohio, the Trump administration’s actions threaten free speech, the rule of law and economic prosperity on the national level.

In the wake of the 2024 presidential election, national and state-level Republicans alike believe they were given something of a mandate to redefine who and what America is for. President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk have been touting Trump’s 1.5% margin of victory in the national popular vote as permission to go on a rampage against the administrative state. They’ve gone after marginalized communities, while Cirino thinks this win gives him permission to attack higher education on the state level. Over 200 people testified and 830 submitted testimony against the bill at a Feb. 11 hearing, and approximately 900 people showed up to protest the bill at The Ohio State University on March 4. That certainly doesn’t seem like a great deal of public support.

Cirino says that the bill will restore academic freedom and undo the discrimination—against the allegedly oppressed minority of white, heterosexual, cisgender men—of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. With SB 1, he says, Ohio will lead the nation in depoliticizing higher education. “The wind is at our backs. And soon we will set sail into a golden age of higher education in the Buckeye State,” a recent release from Cirino’s office concludes. Among other provisions, SB 1 would ban all DEI efforts—including trainings, DEI departments, diversity scholarships and more; regulate academic discussion of “controversial subjects,” defined as “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy”; require faculty and staff to not “indoctrinate any social, political, or religious view”; ban faculty collective bargaining over certain subjects and faculty strikes and require undergraduates to take a “civic education” course that requires reading “patriotic” texts—examples were works by Adam Smith (author of “The Wealth of Nations” and so-called “father of capitalism”) and Martin Luther King Jr. These demands come alongside threats to take away state funding if a public university fails to obey the bill. 

Proponents of SB 1 may claim it is trying to depoliticize public higher education, but a cursory reading of it reveals that it is, in fact, a radical incursion of partisan politics into the academy. The bill refuses to define DEI, leaves open the question of how much intellectual diversity is enough and doesn’t clarify what would constitute indoctrination, making it clear that the metric by which public universities will be measured is by how much they bend to the GOP’s agenda. In disciplines that deal with social relations, it’s difficult to imagine how it would be possible to avoid “controversial subjects” as the bill defines them. As such, it will be difficult for many disciplines to avoid allegations of indoctrination and the scrutiny of the legislature.

It’s telling that academic disciplines that are unavoidably political in their aims and methods, such as gender studies, sociology and social work, get attention for being unacceptably political. Whereas departments of economics, despite their greater influence, prestige and fundamentally political assumptions, usually escape scrutiny for their politics. Instead of encouraging academic freedom, SB 1 crushes any academic opposition. While it attempts to indoctrinate students to the status quo, SB 1’s civic education course is cast as apolitical because it doesn’t threaten those in power (MLK Jr’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” is the exception, but Cirino clearly hasn’t read it).

Whether they reside in Ohio or not, students will be less likely to choose to study in Ohio if academic freedom is jeopardized. What becomes of, for example, Cleveland State University’s highly ranked urban planning program if instructors are scared that they’ll lose funding if they speak too frankly about climate change? Universities are already starting to fold—OSU obeyed in advance by shuttering DEI offices and programs, and the Inter-University Council of Ohio, a lobbying group that represents Ohio’s public universities, has refused to take a stance for or against SB 1 for fear of putting universities in the GOP’s crosshairs. The bill undermines the ability of Ohio’s universities to perform the key task of attracting out-of-state students and retaining in-state talent. Moreover, the Trump administration’s broad cuts to research funding threaten the competitiveness of American research in general, which promises to put us behind the curve. 

While Trump’s actions, like SB 1, threaten free speech, they also threaten the fundamental principles of the rule of law and due process. Through the recent political imprisonment of Palestinian Columbia University student activists Mahmoud Kalil and Leqaa Kordia, extrajudicial deportation of students and academics from Georgetown University and Brown University, visa revocations for those expressing pro-Palestinian sentiment and the pulling of $400 million in research funding from Columbia, his administration broadens the attack. By extralegally deporting non-citizens with whom it has political disagreements, Trump is telling us that citizens and non-citizens alike will face harsh punishment for dissent, legal or not. 

The logic of the war on higher education supposes that a woke surveillance state discriminates against people for being white and stops conservatives from getting college degrees if they refuse to pass ideological litmus tests. Such a thing has never existed. The focus on DEI and “wokeness” stems from the right’s frustration that society, for the past two decades, has rapidly liberalized, especially in academic settings. Social progressivism, though, is not all that is necessary to rectify structural issues. As a result, working-class voters began to believe that the out-of-touch liberal elite was trying to tell them how to think instead of improving their living conditions. Trump catered to that resentment in his reelection campaign. But the voters didn’t elect Trump to remake American society in his backward vision: They wanted to lower the cost of living and believed his rhetoric on that issue. 

Neither political party is equipped to meet the moment. Republicans are misreading their mandate and are pathologically obsessed with returning America to the 19th-century social order by any means necessary, while Democrats seem constitutionally unable to behave with urgency. The fundamental issues of our time ultimately stem from our mode of economic organization. Meanwhile, the GOP is cruelly undermining America’s modest social safety net. DeWine recently instructed the Ohio Department of Medicaid to institute work requirements, which would deprive 61,000 people of health insurance, and congressional Republicans are looking to pay for Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy by cutting nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid. While DEI is a force for good, the progressivism from which DEI originates cannot make significant progress until it is willing to address the elephant in the room—rampant capitalism. Anthropologist Karl Polanyi was right to say that, in the development of capitalism, “human society had become an accessory of the economic system.” Without addressing the subordination of human life to the market, we may never fully address structures of oppression while slipping deeper into totalitarianism. The mission for opposition to the rise of totalitarianism must be to both resist it and offer a genuine alternative to its ruthless vision.