“Just three people” took on Ohio education law — and sparked a movement

Some Ohio colleges and universities fell in line before Senate Bill 1, the “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” even passed through the state legislature. And when it finally did in March, it had a chilling effect. Universities shirked diversity, equity and inclusion programs to comply, and the silence from once-outspoken opponents was striking. Those early signs of kowtowing were bad indicators that the members of Youngstown State University’s faculty union just couldn’t get behind.

“There was such passion against SB 1 whenever it was being pushed through the legislature, so why isn't that passion still there?” Mandy Fehlbaum, a sociologist and the grievance chair for YSU’s chapter of the Ohio Education Association, recalled wondering in a phone interview. “Some people were saying, ‘Oh well, we worked so hard. Now we're tired, and we just have to accept it.’ And like, no, we don't have to accept it.”

So they set out to reverse it.

While other education unions are weighing legal action to overturn the law, which aims to overhaul the state’s higher education system, Fehlbaum, YSU-OEA president Mark Vopat and union spokesperson Cryshanna Jackson Leftwich chose to go political. They began an effort in April to get a referendum on the November ballot, starting with gathering signatures from the 1,000 registered Ohio voters necessary to have their petition certified to the secretary of state. They collected over 6,200 signatures from registered voters in just over a week and certified the petition in early May.

Now, the petition committee is taking on its greater challenge: gathering more than 250,000 signatures in at least 44 of the state’s 88 counties by June 25 — just two days before the law is set to take effect. If their grassroots cause is successful, the law will be paused until Ohioans vote in the general election on whether SB 1 remains law or is ultimately repealed.

“There were three of us that said we are fed up, three individuals… who said, ‘We want to do the right thing, and we want to do something,’” Jackson Leftwich, who also serves as a political science professor at YSU, told Salon. Sometimes you just have to do something, she added. “You can stop or fight against [something] — and you might not always win, but you can make your voice heard. You can have some opposition. You can give these people some pushback to make them think twice.”

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into law on March 28, less than 48 hours after it hit his desk. The legislation, a 42-page revival of previous legislation taken from model bills devised by the conservative National Association of Scholars, implements regulations on classroom discussions on “controversial beliefs,” including climate policy, marriage, immigration and electoral politics. It also strikes diversity, equity and inclusion programs, policies and scholarships as well as related spending; prohibits faculty strikes; and blocks unions from negotiating tenure among other provisions.

Proponents of the bill, including Republican sponsor state Sen. Jerry Cirino, argue that it enhances freedom of speech and academic freedom, promotes intellectual diversity, and “installs a number of other worthwhile provisions,” including establishing post-tenure periodic review and banning political and ideological litmus tests in hiring, promotions and admissions decisions.

“Our Founders treasured diversity of thought so highly they made free speech our very first guaranteed right,” Cirino said in a January news release announcing the bill’s introduction. “It’s time to bring that right back to campus.”

But that’s where the petition committee’s qualms come in. They argue the legislation is actually a censorship bill, replete with union-busting measures and a vague maze of anti-DEI stipulations that stymie students’ access to social support, financial resources and needed accommodations. Meanwhile, course regulations said to bolster diversity in thought place professors in a confusing bind over the content they can teach and problematic ideas they must entertain in class.

“Students who want to hold views like, ‘Slavery was good,’ — I shouldn't have to take class time to seriously entertain certain ideas like that,” Vopat, a philosophy professor , told Salon.

Vopat, Fehlbaum and Jackson Leftwich also flagged other glaring issues. The law, they argued, effectively ends tenure by folding tenure policy into the purview of each public institution's board of trustees. Plus, it requires the inclusion of a question about whether a professor creates an unbiased classroom environment on student evaluations, the answer to which they fear could spur investigations into faculty as the law regulates discussion of controversial subjects. Altogether, they say the law has the potential to drive students away from Ohio's public universities.

“This bill... at least in my experience, in my 20-plus years at Youngstown State and higher ed, it just dismantles what higher ed's supposed to be,” Vopat added in a phone interview. It makes the university into a business where profit is king and faculty are “just replaceable.”

The term-limited governor’s signature began a 90-day timeline for any interested Ohioan to launch an effort to challenge the legislation. After consulting with other education unions and hearing nothing about a ballot referendum in the works, Vopat, Jackson Leftwich and Fehlbaum — with the support of YSU-OEA’s executive committee — decided that they would be the ones to take up the charge.

Their effort felt like a race against time, one that Vopat said they knew from the beginning they wouldn’t be able to win alone. They drafted the initial petition language, had it reviewed by a former YSU student-turned-lawyer and sent calls out to their network of unions to set the process in motion.

As more and more people requested access to it, their work to certify the petition to stay SB 1 and get the law on the ballot gained momentum. In just 10 days, they obtained 6,253 signatures across 423 part-petitions, according to the Ohio SB 1 petition website.

While Vopat said he initially pegged the ballot referendum a “long shot” and a “Hail Mary,” he now regrets that characterization.

“Now, I think we're actually in the game, like there's time, because once we announced, we've had a huge groundswell of support. I mean, it was shocking how many people,” Vopat told Salon.

Since their petition was certified on May 5, the group has secured a cohort of more than 1,500 volunteers statewide to help with signature gathering and garnered the backing of more than a dozen organizations, including Blue Ohio, Indivisible and the Ohio Democratic House Caucus. They’ve also fundraised just under $40,000 and founded the Labor, Education, and Diversity ballot issue political action committee to support the referendum effort.

All of the money they’ve raised thus far goes toward materials, mainly printing the 18,000 petitions and counting currently in circulation across the state. While Fehlbaum said the process has presented a “steep learning curve” — relying on volunteer help, navigating the particulars of scanning each copy of the petition and starting a PAC for the first time — she, Vopat and Jackson Leftwich have been blown away by the support their effort has received from Ohioans thus far.

Fehlbaum, who leads the petition committee’s outreach and organizing arm, declined to share exactly how many signatures they’ve collected since certification because the organizers don’t want the numbers to encourage their opposition to push harder. Fehlbaum did say, however, that they’ve collected signatures in 82 of Ohio’s 88 counties — blowing one of the requirements out of the water — and saw huge returns from Memorial Day weekend. Pride events throughout June and Juneteenth present other ripe signature-gathering opportunities they hope to capitalize on.

“It's an uphill battle for sure,” Fehlbaum said, describing the challenge of informing voters about the bill and their petition. “We realize we are underdogs in this, but we are doing our best to put a concerted effort there, and I think that it's very feasible we'll be able to do it.”

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Ohio’s public academic institutions have been rolling out changes to comply with the law as the state closes in on the deadline for SB 1 to take effect. Much to the dismay of its students and faculty, Ohio State University was ahead of the curve, announcing diversity office closures and staffing cuts in February in compliance with federal directives to slash DEI programs and in preparation for a then-progressing SB 1. In late April, the University of Toledo discontinued nine undergraduate majors — including Africana studies, Asian studies, disability studies, Spanish and Women’s and Gender Studies — to adhere to SB 1’s low conferral rate requirements.

Ohio University also announced a week later that it was sunsetting its Division of Diversity and Inclusion, which housed its Women, Pride and Multicultural Centers, and established six working groups to implement the law’s new requirements. The southeastern Ohio institution also generated backlash when it paused a Black Alumni Reunion event in an apparent reaction to the bill.

Jackson Leftwich, Vopat and Fehlbaum see these changes in a broader context. The state’s upending of Ohio colleges through SB 1, they said, is a microcosm of the Trump administration’s battle against higher education, cowing public and private universities into compliance with anti-DEI, anti-immigration and anti-protest measures or slashing funding from institutions that refuse.

“If the federal level held strong, then the state couldn't get away with it, because people could file federal lawsuits against the state,” Jackson Leftwich said. “But the state sees the weakness in the federal government, and so they're like, ‘We can get away with doing the wrong thing.'”

But Vopat said he also sees possibilities for nationwide change in that connection. He hopes that seeing their effort to protect higher education — no matter how successful it ends up — will show other Americans that they have the power to fight back, too.

“I'm hoping that people realize that there is a chance that you can do this, that there are other people who feel the same way — that things have gone too far — and [that] we need to pull back and stop some of these things that are happening, not only in Ohio, but in Florida, Indiana, other places across the country.”