For those of us working in higher education, the past year has been marked by a wave of legislation targeting academic freedom and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Bolstered by Trump’s re-election and the anti-DEI executive orders from his administration, Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed sweeping bills that prohibit DEI efforts on college and university campuses and interfere in university operations to “curb liberal bias on university and college campuses.”
Attacks on higher education have come at the same time as renewed onslaught against trans rights at the federal and state level. For faculty, students, and staff, the impacts of these bills often intersect: legislation that restricts trans athletes’ participation in sports, trans youth access to healthcare, and trans students’ access to bathrooms all impact those of us at K-12 schools,colleges, and universities.
Here in Ohio, our state legislature has created an increasingly hostile environment for LGBTQ students, faculty, and staff members, as well as those of us who teach women, gender, and sexuality studies and other classes that engage topics related to identity and systems of power.
As a queer and feminist faculty member teaching at Kenyon College, a small liberal arts college in rural Ohio, my school year was marked by concern for the well-being of my students, frustration about a lack of communication from college administration, panic about the attacks against my academic discipline, and frequent anxious conversations with my colleagues about how to face this current moment. My own anxiety turned into fear after I received anonymous sexist, harassing text messages and phone calls sent to my personal number; I later learned these messages were sent to female faculty members across the country.
Over the past month, I spoke with 11 people across Ohio — six faculty members, four students, and one staff member — to talk about what it’s been like navigating the increased political harassment from the state government over the past year.
Fear, Panic, and Uncertainty on Ohio Campuses in the Wake of State’s Anti-DEI Bill
“This was one of the most draining years,” Dr. Sharon Barnes, the chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies department at the University of Toledo, tells me. “SB1 changed the game.”
Senate Bill 1, officially known as the Advance Ohio Higher Education Act, has had far-reaching consequences for Ohio’s public institutions. The bill prohibits all DEI programming on campuses, bans faculty strikes during contract negotiations, eliminates degree programs with fewer than five student majors, requires annual reviews for faculty (including those with tenure), requires professors to post their syllabi online for the public to review, and creates mandatory American civics courses at each institution.
SB1 has created a climate of fear, panic, and uncertainty for students, faculty, and staff in Ohio. Diversity offices — including women’s centers, LGBTQ centers, and multicultural student centers — have been shut down across Ohio as university administrators scramble to comply with the bill, which goes into effect on June 27.
At the University of Toledo, Barnes has faced pressure from university administration to close or merge her department for a number of years. While the Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS) faculty at UT have worked closely with allied colleagues and departments to keep their class enrollments high to prove their courses are in demand, SB1’s new requirements for a minimum number of majors per department gave the provost ammunition to “suspend admissions into the degree program immediately.”
As a result, WGS was eliminated as a major at the University of Toledo, alongside nine other majors, including Africana Studies, Religious Studies, and Disability Studies, for falling below the enrollment requirements of the new law.
It’s “no surprise” that disciplines exploring identity, power, and difference are penalized under the law, Barnes tells me. These departments and programs tend to have fewer majors than other disciplines but often have high enrollments for individual classes. (For context, I was one of just three seniors who graduated with a Women’s and Gender Studies major from Columbia University in 2012). That doesn’t make them any less crucial to the campus community.
Majoring in WGS was “genuinely the best experience of my life,” Nora Swerbinsky tells me. She graduated from Toledo with a WGS degree in December 2024 and is now pursuing a library science master’s degree at Kent State University. “It was like a gut punch knowing how hard we all worked to try and keep it open.” Swerbinsky shares that students in WGS worked closely with faculty members over the past year, strategizing how to increase the visibility and spread awareness of the legal challenges to the department.
“It was a lot of time and energy spent trying to prove our worth, on top of also doing our assignments and getting ready to graduate,” she adds. “So, it was a very stressful time, because even though I was graduating and I wasn’t going to be there anymore, I still don’t want to see the program get cut, because that program meant so much to me.”
“There’s personal heartache around it, but also you see the loss to the institution, the knowledge that our students take to their other classes and take to their communities,” Barnes says.
For now, Women’s and Gender Studies will remain a department at the University of Toledo and continue to offer the same classes for all interested students. “The dean was really pushing us to make some decisions about merging with other entities…[but] we’re going to be back in the fall looking exactly like we looked last fall,” Barnes says. Barnes and her colleagues are closely watching the political climate and carefully weighing their options for moving forward.
“What programs are going to be on the chopping block next? Which universities are going to be next? Because if they see that they can do this, what’s going to stop them from going further?” Swerbinsky asks.
“I’m not giving up,” Barnes says. “I’m excited about the repeal SB1 efforts.” Organizers across the state are currently gathering signatures to put a referendum of SB1 on the ballot in November. They have just a few weeks to collect the 250,000 signatures needed to do so. Barnes is not deterred by these numbers: “What does that say to our students, to ourselves, if we only fight battles we can win?”
State Bathroom Bills Sow More Fear on Ohio Campuses
As we’ve seen across the country when it comes to anti-DEI efforts at the federal and state levels, institutions often comply in advance before laws go into effect. Dr. Anima Adjepong, the head of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at University of Cincinnati, is wary of “anticipatory compliance” across Ohio. “SB1 has taken up a lot of mental space. It’s really taken away from the work that we’re doing,” he says.
As the head of their department, they send a newsletter to alumni every year. This year, their letter was not published by the alumni association. “The reason I was given was that ‘in the current political moment, blah blah blah,’” Adjepong says. “One, SB1 is not law. Two, I understand that I’m entitled to academic freedom. And three, for me, not publishing that newsletter felt like a targeted attack. I described myself as a queer, African immigrant. They said I described Audre Lorde as a Black feminist lesbian, which is how Audre Lorde described herself! So, there is a suppression of speech that’s happening in compliance ahead of the bill coming through.”
Adjepong notes they’ve seen how SB1 has affected students already. “I was teaching an Intro to Black Women’s Studies course this semester, and my students were devastated,” they say. “They were so happy to have this space and were very scared that, with the passage of SB1, a class like this would not be able to run.”
While there is nothing in SB1 that specifically dictates what faculty can and cannot teach, the definition of DEI in the bill is vague. This has created an environment in which students are afraid all mentions and discussions of race, gender, and sexuality on campus will be censored. And Adjepong knows, ultimately, “the goal was to shut us down.”
The increase in anti-trans legislation in Ohio has added insult to injury. In February, a bathroom bill known as Senate Bill 104 took effect after the governor signed it into law. The law restricts bathroom access for trans and non-binary students, faculty, and staff across the state, at the K-12 and collegiate levels and at both public and private institutions. Meanwhile, House Bill 68, which bans gender-affirming care for trans youth and bars trans women from participating in women’s sports, became law in 2024 after the Ohio state legislature voted to override the governor’s veto of the bill. HB68 was struck down by an appeals court in March, but the law remains in effect during the appeal process.
In response to SB104, the University of Cincinnati put up signs across campus labeling bathrooms “biological male” and “biological female,” which they eventually took down after pushback from the community. “That was incredibly violent, as a trans person myself,” Adjepong says. “It cost the university a lot of money to put up these really idiotic signs and then to take them down.”
To address the bathroom bill, Adjepong emailed graduate students, faculty, and affiliate faculty “to articulate that, from the perspective of this interdisciplinary field, part of what this notion of biological gender is doing is a kind of psychological violence.” “I also asked the dean of the college, ‘hey, what are you all going to do about this?’” Adjepong adds. “Nothing happened.”
Adjepong sees a lot of burnout among their colleagues in this moment. “Students are suffering,” they say. “They’re suffering because they have stress around their student debt. They have stress around paying for their day-to-day lives and trying to fit learning into that. As a faculty member, I’m dealing with very constrained resources in terms of the burden of service, because I’m in a very small department and we’re trying to do so much for so many students with so few faculty. When we have to deal with laws like this, that’s another burden.”
Students, Staff, and Faculty Fight Back
Across Ohio’s college campuses, there has been widespread pushback to the increase in governmental oversight of higher education. Faculty at the University of Cincinnati are unionized, which “makes a very big difference, because there is an organized resistance,” Adjepong says. Many of his colleagues went to Columbus, the state capital, to testify against SB1 and held drives for writing testimony to submit to the legislature for those who couldn’t travel. Faculty and students protested outside the university’s Board of Trustees meeting in February to demonstrate their dissent from the university’s compliance with SB1 and SB104. Adjepong calls it “one of the most wonderful things” that happened this year.
Protests were a common occurrence across the state this spring. After Ohio State University became the first school in Ohio to close all of its DEI offices in February, students, faculty and staff protested on campus and at the Ohio state house in downtown Columbus.
It was “good to see people all across the scales of involvement at OSU come together and be vocal,” says Dr. LaVelle Ridley, an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at OSU. The closure of the DEI offices “resulted in material harm for our students, particularly our students who are already the most vulnerable, our international students, Muslim students, students of color, and queer and trans students. It’s been really difficult to be able to hold them through all that.”
Ridley, a Black trans scholar who started her position at OSU last fall, shares that it was “a sweet and sour first year,” dealing with “the emotional weight” of the anti-trans, anti-DEI, and anti-higher education legislation. Despite OSU’s cruel anticipatory compliance with SB1, she praises her department’s reactions. “[There was] almost unanimous consensus about where our feminist ethics lie, how we think about and conceive of what’s going on, how we want to act, and specifically how we want to work with each other,” she says. She feels cared for and supported by her department in the face of these attacks, which have included a recent racist and transphobic right-wing hit piece that labeled Ridley a “radical activist.”
In the days leading up to the start of Pride Month, OSU deactivated the LGBTQ resource page on its website. “We understand that the tactic is to overwhelm us, to wear us down, to get us stressed out,” Ridley says. To support her students, she has made space and time in her classes this semester to talk about what’s happening on campus and at the state and federal levels,connecting it to the ways gender, sexuality, race, and class structure our everyday lives and the worlds around us.
“We can analyze all these things as intentionally working together to create a very fascist conservative fabric that will capture us all,” Ridley says. “Even though this seems like it just impacts trans people, or poor students, or international students, this actually will impact everyone in different ways.”
Ridley would ultimately like to see OSU’s administration reverse its decisions to close its DEI centers and reinstate them, regardless of threats to funding or pushback from the state. “I don’t want anything less than that, because we don’t deserve anything less than that,” she says.
Meanwhile, many students are working together to make sure the diversity initiatives on their campuses don’t disappear, even if the offices themselves have closed. In May, Ohio University made headlines as it closed its Multicultural Center, Pride Center, and Women’s Center. A faculty member at OU, who prefers not to be identified by name, tells me she and her colleagues were anticipating the closure for months. Once SB1 was introduced in the Ohio state legislature, “the panic set in at that point, and I don’t think it ever went away,” she says. “SB1 just moved so fast and there was no stopping it.” While OU’s president released a statement affirming the university’s ongoing commitment to incorporating DEI work into all aspects of the institution, the university’s Division of Diversity and Inclusion has closed, and all of its staff positions have been eliminated.
“Students don’t want these programs going away,” the anonymous OU faculty member says. “We know that these programs and the work that these units are doing is critical. So then there’s the question of, okay, right, we’re going to continue to do that work. But who’s going to continue to do that work?”
The burden of diversity labor will likely now be shouldered by students and faculty members. This professor shares that, for a community engagement aspect of a class, students decided to “move books out of the Pride Center to an off-campus location” because they were concerned that the Pride Center would just shut overnight.
Multicultural student centers and diversity offices often serve as crucial sites of campus advocacy and provide critical services for community members. At OU, the Women’s Center has historically played important roles in securing parental leave benefits for employees, creating accessible lactation centers on campus, and providing free menstrual products in bathrooms. It also founded a successful survivor advocacy program that became its own non-profit. The loss of this center — and those across the state — is impossible to calculate.
Sage Kerrigan-Christ, a rising sophomore and student activist at OU, tells me that many students are disheartened and frustrated by the closure of the centers. “When I talk about it with my peers, it’s usually venting,” they say. “It’s usually like, ‘Hey, I’m outraged about this. What are we doing about it?’ And they’re like, ‘Hey, yeah, I’m also outraged about it. I want to do more. What can we do to do more?’”
Over the spring semester, students at OU were active in opposing SB1: In addition to campus protests, OU’s student senate condemned SB1 and passed a bill to denounce bigotry on campus. Students also organized the campus’s LGBTQ graduation ceremony this year themselves, which was previously run by staff at the Pride Center.
The Future of Academic Freedom on Ohio Campuses
While the rapid speed of SB1’s implementation has felt shocking, a WGS faculty member at another state university, who also preferred to remain anonymous, tells me it “doesn’t feel entirely new. It feels more exhausting.” WGS programs and departments, and other disciplines devoted to interrogating power, have faced challenges and push back from university administration and state government since their inception.
“Each time the state does something that undermines people’s ability to decide their own curriculum, to decide how they do research, each time that has happened over the last couple decades, [it] has undermined [academic freedom],” she says. “They’re just making it harder for students to get that education, and that’s on purpose.”
She has found it important to teach students about queer history and activism, “how queer people found networks and lived” in the face of institutionalized transphobia and homophobia, as one powerful way to address this contemporary moment.
Diversity offices have not yet closed at this professor’s school. Right now, she is most worried about SB1’s provision that all syllabi must be released for public review, which goes into effect in 2026. She’s concerned that faculty members will become “targets,” particularly those who teach and research “controversial” topics related to gender, sexuality, race, and class. She has chosen not to be named in this piece out of concern for the safety of her family, should she become a target herself.
“Since [SB1] passed, I’ve had informal conversations with people who said to me, ‘I don’t know if I’ll be able to teach this class anymore,’ or ‘I don’t know if I’m going to have to take out the content,’” she says. “They don’t have to [shut down the department]; they can just make an environment where people are too nervous to put on their CVs or put on their syllabi that this is what [they] do and teach.” She encourages colleagues to continue teaching these classes. “It’s hard to kill a program that’s healthy,” she says, “so offer classes, and tell your students to take the classes.”
The impacts of SB1 are currently most strongly felt by faculty, students, and staff at public universities across the state. But the Ohio legislature’s proposed state budget could force private institutions to comply with parts of SB1 to maintain state funding.
Eve Kausch, the Outreach Librarian for Special Collections & Archives at Kenyon College, tells me there’s “a lot of unknown right now” about if and how SB1 might affect private colleges. “The uncertainty, it’s definitely nerve-wracking,” they say.
They are a co-founder and member of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEA) Committee at the Kenyon library, which works to implement meaningful and concrete initiatives to better serve students. This has included creating a sensory-friendly room in the building and creating and disseminating a graphic image displaying the location of gender neutral bathrooms in the library. Kausch is also planning an exhibit on banned books for the fall. Staff are “trying to really center marginalized people in the library,” they say.
Kausch says it’s “really important right now to make sure that [the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] is fully staffed and fully funded,” as these centers do not yet have to close at private institutions.
They want “more explicit support for the trans community and the broader queer community” at Kenyon. “Saying it and showing it are two different things.”
“This is the most conservative place I’ve ever lived,” Kausch adds. They have begun asking themselves: “Do I be visible and proud in my identities and my work, or do I fly under the radar and keep doing what I’m doing but doing it quietly?”
“There’s definitely, in the back of my mind, a thought of, when is the tipping point where that becomes unsafe?” Kausch says.
Trans Students Need Support
Students, staff, and faculty at Kenyon grew frustrated after it became clear the state’s bathroom bill would decrease gender neutral bathroom access on campus. It took college administration months to communicate about this with students, which contributed to an environment of fear and uncertainty on campus as trans and non-binary students were unsure what bathrooms they would be able to use. After the college released its plan for compliance with the law, Fox News ran an inflammatory story with the headline “Ohio college ‘illegally forcing students’ to share bathrooms with opposite sex.” The unwanted national attention forced Kenyon to revise its policies again.
“Can you just tell us that you support us?” asks a trans student at Kenyon, who prefers to remain anonymous. “We’ve continuously just been calling for more open communication” from campus administration.
Lack of clear and material support from the college contributes to what this student describes as the “mental load” of navigating college while trans. This student is active in campus organizations but finds it “really hard to balance” being a student and being an activist with the horrifying experience of being persecuted by the state and federal government.
This student expresses gratitude towards faculty who planned a Trans Day of Visibility event in March and those who drafted and signed a letter of support for trans, non-binary, and gender-non-conforming community members. “Reading that was very heartwarming…just seeing that people’s names were on there was pretty significant.”
“Students are being targeted by massive institutions,” says Max Fishman, a rising senior and student activist at Kenyon. “It has definitely felt different to see norms change and see infrastructure that used to support me not be there anymore…it’s less challenging that there are fewer bathrooms that I can use, and more challenging knowing that the reason behind that is that there are people who are trying to legislate away my existence.”
Fishman is interested in “building networks and connections and trust between students and staff and faculty” to create more capacity for organizing and advocacy. Fishman and fellow activists organized a Trans Town Hall in spring semester as well as a campus walk out in coalition with student organizations fighting for justice in Palestine and advocating for increased support of international students.
“People need to start viewing themselves not as individuals with solutions to collective problems, but as individuals who can build networks and with those networks, they can address collective problems,” Fishman says. “I think we should keep our eyes on the prize, which is not just we need trans students to have better bathroom options, but we need our college to not be reliant on the state, and we need more transparency among the board of trustees.”
In a similar vein, Dr. John Rufo, an Assistant Professor of American Studies who is affiliated with the Gender & Sexuality Studies department at Kenyon, tells me, “I would like to continue to see students (current and alumni), faculty, staff, and caretakers persist in coming together to form coalitions.” They add, “We convey our mutual reliance on each other through actions. Anyone can join these forms of political work; it is simply a mistake to believe that only an individual can do all the heavy lifting.”
It remains to be seen what the next academic year will bring for Ohio campuses. Republicans in the state legislature continue to propose anti-trans legislation, including a ban on drag and a bill that would prohibit public school teachers and staff from referring to trans students’ by any name not listed on their original birth certificate.
While academic freedom, trans rights, and DEI initiatives are all at risk, it was heartening to learn about all the ways faculty, students, and staff are meeting this moment together, be it in the classroom, in the streets, or in halls of the state house. As Sage Kerrigan-Christ at Ohio University tells me, now is the moment to “organize with people who are like minded, who share identities, share thoughts and feelings about being queer and expressing yourselves clearly, queerly.”
“We’re all working towards the same big goal of just being able to live how we want to live, be who we want to be, and love who we want to love,” Kerrigan-Christ says. “That goal is wholly beautiful and it is going to be realized eventually.”
“Pride at Ohio is forever.”
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You guys are the best. This is so wonderful (also thank you for including me!)
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also yes brief encounter my god