Architect of Ohio Higher Ed Overhaul on Shared Governance: Garbage

State-level Republican politicians have been increasingly intervening in public higher education in matters once left to boards of trustees, university administrators and faculty. Ohio state Sen. Jerry Cirino has been among the most prominent.

In 2025, Cirino, former chair of the Senate Workforce and Higher Education Committee, succeeded in persuading his fellow GOP members to finally pass the sweeping Senate Bill 1, despite significant opposition from faculty and students who went as far as arguing it essentially eliminates tenure and kills higher ed. The legislation had been debated for two years.

Among other things, SB 1 banned full-time faculty from striking; allowed certain administrators to, at any time, launch post-tenure reviews that could result in termination; mandated a version of institutional neutrality; prohibited diversity, equity and inclusion offices, DEI in job descriptions and DEI in scholarships; required institutions to “demonstrate intellectual diversity” in areas including course approval, general education requirements, common reading programs and faculty annual reviews; and mandated four-year institutions publicly post online the syllabi for undergraduate courses.

An Ohio Department of Higher Education spokesperson said in an email that 547 academic programs “have been closed or committed to close by Aug. 15, 2026,” in the wake of SB 1’s passage. Cirino said that’s due to another provision in the law that generally required institutions to ax any undergraduate degree programs that award fewer than five degrees annually, on average.

He’s now pushing new legislation that would give Republican-backed university civics centers the right to decide who can teach the “American civic literacy” courses that SB 1 newly required of bachelor’s degree seekers.

Cirino, 74, said he really wants to improve higher ed. He said he has 40 grandchildren, all in Ohio, some of whom are still in college. “I want them to get the best education they can get, public or private, and so that’s why I have skin in the game,” he said.

Inside Higher Ed sat down with Cirino at Howard University, where he was in town for a panel during an Education Writers Association conference, to talk about how he got into politics, his disagreements with faculty and “woke,” and more. Excepts of the interview follow and have been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How and why did you get into politics?

A: I’ve always had an interest in public policy, but I was very busy running companies. I was CEO of four different medical device companies, and very busy traveling internationally, and my wife and I also have nine kids.

So I never had time to run for a school board or city council or anything like that.

When I sold my last company in 2013, and our last child went away to college—Mount St. Mary’s University, not too far from here—I suddenly realized I had some time to do something now to get involved because I saw a lot of policies I didn’t like, locally and nationally. So, I talked to a friend [Lake County GOP chair Dale Fellows] and I said I’d like to run for office in the county, Lake County, where I live. And he said, “Well, you’re a former CEO, you should run for county commissioner, it’s the highest office in the county.”

And I did, and I won [in 2016]. I was elected along with Trump’s first—I’ve run with him twice.

[Then] I was contacted by some people in Columbus [including incoming Senate President Matt Huffman] who said, “We have a Senate seat coming up here, we’d like you to think about running for that.”

So I did, and I had tremendous support, and won my race very comfortably, and started in the Senate in January of 2021.

The two things that I really focused on was economic development, because that’s what I did as a county commissioner a lot—and I was a CEO, so I sat on the other side of the desk looking for economic development deals—and higher education, which at that time had gone so woke. It needed to be reformed, and I was ready to do it, and the president of the Senate at the time, who is now Speaker of the House, Matt Huffman, he said, “We need to change this stuff, and get rid of the wokeness, get rid of DEI, get rid of these universities that have run amok, and bring them back into the fold.” And he said, “I want a bulldog for higher education.”

So he made me chairman of the higher ed committee. And that’s when I started Senate Bill 135, which was my first one, which dealt with free speech. [My] second one was 83, which morphed into Senate Bill 1.

Q: The second higher ed bill you introduced was 83?

A: Yes.

Q: Wow.

A: I did some other things. I co-sponsored some CCP—College Credit Plus—bills to expand that, and to make it easier for students to participate because it saves them a lot of money. And, once I got into it, there was no stopping me. I’m very passionate about it. I still am. And, you may recall, I took a lot of arrows on that stuff. The [American Association of University Professors] union came after me big-time.

I had seven-hour hearings [on SB 83/SB 1]. Everybody got to testify, and they were mostly students because the faculty got the students to go and testify against the bill. They wouldn’t do it themselves, [with] few exceptions. [Erynn Beaton, interim president of Ohio State University’s AAUP chapter, told Inside Higher Ed in an email that “suggesting that faculty didn’t want to testify strikes me as absurd, given that hundreds from across the state did so.” Clara Conover, lead organizer of the Ohio Student Association, said her group’s opposition to the “deeply unpopular” SB 1 was student-led.]

Q: You mentioned higher ed going “so woke” in 2021. How was it going woke?

A: First of all, DEI was in high gear. Litmus testing in hiring. Ohio State … was out of control.

They were practicing institutional discrimination, which is wrong.

Ohio State changed their policies even before we passed the law—the idea that we were looking at it, and they knew it was wrong. [An Ohio State spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed in an email, “Ohio State recruits and selects the most qualified individuals for open positions. In all cases, recruitment and selection activities are guided by a commitment that all qualified applicants are considered, and hiring is done in compliance with federal and state law.”]

Aaron M. Sprecher/Getty Images

[Another issue was] I saw the faculty unions striking or threatening to strike to interrupt a contract between the students and the university.

They’ve been doing that for decades. Not every university in Ohio has a union, but they either strike or they threaten to strike, and they do it at the most inconvenient time, like in March before graduation. So what happens is that the boards and the presidents get held up basically at gunpoint—“Well, we don’t want to have a strike”—so they give them a new dental plan or whatever they’re asking for. [Jennifer Price, executive director of the statewide Ohio conference of the AAUP, said there have only been two strikes, totaling three days, at one university, and one three-week strike at another, since faculty in Ohio won the right to strike in 1984.]

I look at it very simply as a contract issue. The student signs up for 16 hours of credits for a semester. They have to pay up front … you’re basically paying up front. That’s a contract between the student—he pays, she pays—and they get institutional instruction delivered to them by the faculty.

Why would we allow a third party to interrupt that fulfillment of that contract with a strike? So in Senate Bill 1, I got a no-strike provision.

We also took some other things called retrenchment [rights], which gives the university presidents the ability to eliminate courses or eliminate majors and so on, without having to go through this shared governance garbage where the faculty gets to decide whether they’re going to eliminate faculty. I mean, it never happens, right? So, we took that off the table for negotiations as well, and the unions didn’t like that, but I stuck to my guns, and it is now law in Ohio.

Q: Your opposition to faculty deciding whether other faculty should be laid off is, what?

A: It’s really kind of a business analogy, and this is where my business background came in.

I have no problem with unions. I dealt with steelworkers in Buffalo, OK? You don’t get much tougher than that. But you’ve got to use whatever leverage you have. You want the company to succeed, but you also want to give the workers fair wages and benefits and so on.

But it speaks to the issue of the 547 program majors that have now been eliminated in the state of Ohio in a little over a year because of what I did in Senate Bill 1, requiring that any program major that can’t demonstrate [five] graduates per year for the last three years has to be eliminated. They would never have done that on their own. We made it law. These unproductive programs—you have to have tenured faculty, you’ve got to have administrative support, you might have teaching assistants, whatever, to support that major. If it’s graduating fewer than three, it makes no business sense at all.

That’s what our universities, many of them, have become: faculty-centric. They don’t exist for the faculty. We need the faculty, we need good faculty, but they’re delivering a product to our customer.”

—Sen. Jerry Cirino

So, just like in my companies, I would not go ask the workers—who are members of the union—what we should do in our labor negotiations. That’s ridiculous, right? They’re not going to voluntarily do anything. The faculty is not going to. And, besides, even if there is a remote chance that they would agree, it takes two, three years, and the presidents were very frustrated.

In today’s environment, with fewer students coming in and higher costs with inflation, we need to give our boards and our presidents the ability to move quickly to respond to workforce demands that are different. And we need to give them the tools they need to run their operations like a business. I know it’s not exactly like a business, but they could use some of the practices.

This isn’t a left-right issue. It’s how do we make higher ed better, more responsive to students, and how do we make them student-centric, not faculty-centric. That’s what our universities, many of them, have become: faculty-centric. They don’t exist for the faculty. We need the faculty, we need good faculty, but they’re delivering a product to our customer. And you could argue our customer is either the student or the hiring companies that are hiring graduates. You could make an argument that they’re really the customer, ultimately.

Q: Going back to 2021, when you got into this and were focusing on higher ed: You mentioned, one, you opposed racial discrimination against applicants—

A: Or gender discrimination.

Q: —and existing employees. So you felt that there was discrimination against white men, is that correct?

A: There was just a lot of discrimination. It could have been white men, white women, it could have been Asians.

Q: Well, you referred to it as DEI. So I’m trying to figure out what kind of racial discrimination did you see within Ohio universities?

A: Well DEI wasn’t necessarily, by definition, to advantage a specific race, though it did have the effect of doing that. But it was excluding Asian Americans. In search committees—and the documentation is out there in emails—they would exclude. “Don’t bother to ask somebody in for an interview, if they’re X, Y or Z,” depending on what the job was that they were interviewing for.

That’s wrong. We need to be as I did in business. I want to always hire the best, the sharpest, the most experienced person that I could find. I don’t care if they’re Black, white, pink, yellow, whatever. And our universities were trying to correct what they perceived as a past discrimination—like set-asides and other things—that they thought, “Well, if we discriminate on this end, the pendulum will have swung and we’ll get to some level of center.” Well, as Justice John Roberts said, if you want to stop discrimination, stop discrimination. You can’t correct a past discrimination by discriminating now. It ethically does not pass the smell test.

Q: They were discriminating in favor of minority groups, but you thought that that discrimination was just making the problem worse because it was just adding more discrimination?

A: Yeah.

I was in high school in the ’60s. So, the whole civil rights movement—I mean I’m very sympathetic to it, certainly—because I saw live on TV the stuff that was going on before you were born. I’ve always done everything in my practice of running companies, of giving everybody an opportunity; I don’t care what they look like. And we have made great strides in that regard. When I think about what it was like in the ’60s and early ’70s, we have come a long way, but when you are overtly turning people down or not even giving them an opportunity because of something that they have no control over—if you’re a white male, I didn’t ask to be a white male, but here I am. I should not be discriminated against because of that.

If you want to stop discrimination—if in fact it’s going on, and I think it’s arguably much, much better than it was in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, that people of all races and genders have great opportunities now—we shouldn’t be helping one and disadvantaging another.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit behind the scenes of your trying to pass Senate Bill 83 and eventually Senate Bill 1? That debate lasted a few years.

A: We passed it [SB 83] in the Senate in three months. Then it sat all summer because the House was not in session.

I got it through committee. I testified as the sponsor of the bill for four hours in the House—which is highly unusual, I think it may be a record—but I wanted to go through the entire bill and answer every question that anybody on the committee had. Well, we had a Speaker of the House back then who was elected by getting Democrat votes as Speaker instead of strictly by his caucus, the Republicans, so he had loyalties to the Democrats, who didn’t like my bill at all.

So I tried to be as persuasive as I could; I actually took the no-strike provision out because people in the House told me that if we did that, they could pass the bill. And I told them, if you don’t pass the bill by the end of December, I’m going to reintroduce the bill, Senate Bill 1, and I’m putting the no-strike provision back in.

I tried to convince the AAUP to support 83 without the no-strike provision. They couldn’t help themselves, and now they have to live with a no-strike provision that is law in Ohio.

We’re paying a lot of the bills; we certainly have a seat at the table in terms of the product that they produce. We’re not trying to be academics.

—Sen. Jerry Cirino

I called it Senate Bill 1 because it was the No. 1 priority for the Senate in the brand-new [session] and that should tell everybody who was watching: It’s going to pass.

Matt Huffman … who was Senate president, was now Speaker. The guy who was my problem was gone.

So, anybody that knew what was going on in Columbus had to know that my Senate Bill 1 was going to pass, and I was also working with the governor’s people to make sure that he would sign it. So AAUP was really wrong not to support 83. They really should have. I can’t believe it.

[Price, the Ohio conference of the AAUP executive director, said her predecessor in her position said Cirino “never engaged with the Ohio conference” about provisions in the bill or asked for its support with or without the no-strike provision. Beaton, the Ohio State University AAUP chapter interim president, told Inside Higher Ed, “At no point during the passage of SB 83/SB 1 were OSU faculty invited to meet with Sen. Cirino, which we took as a lack of interest in understanding the faculty perspective. Regardless of the strike provision, AAUP-OSU would never have supported SB 1 because of the harm it does to academic freedom and our students.”]

Q: You’ve criticized woke ideology before and DEI before. SB 1 didn’t define DEI. How do you define these terms?

A: Woke is the more difficult one to define because it means different things to different people, I suppose. But it’s like the soup de jour, sort of. What is a popular movement? After George Floyd, everybody was wanting to get rid of the police, they wanted to do this, they wanted to do all kinds of things—out of guilt, I guess, as to what happened. And people jump onto it and [are] not even sure necessarily why they’re believing something, but they just believe it because it’s the bandwagon, and they’re jumping on the bandwagon.

I don’t like woke movements because no matter what the issue is, it’s like, “Come up with your own thoughts and your own opinions.”

DEI is, as I define it, institutional discrimination. It’s that simple, and it was perpetrated in different ways at different places.

I want everybody to have an equal opportunity. It doesn’t mean everybody gets equal things because that’s not what equality means. Everybody should have the equal opportunity to succeed in whatever their endeavor is, and that includes attending, getting into and coming out successfully of a university.

Q: You say you are fighting ideological bias in higher ed. What do you say to those critics who say, well, you’re just adding your own ideological bias—you are just pulling things to the right that you think have been pulled to the left, and you’re just making the problem worse?

A: I want to get to the center; that’s where our institutions should be.

This isn’t a left-right issue. All the academics on the other side of this issue want to paint it that way. But I want to get to neutrality, that’s what we should have.

Some of my best professors, Ryan, were professors who, at the end of the semester, I couldn’t tell you what their political beliefs were, and that’s what we should have.

I wouldn’t mind it if a professor told me that I’m a Republican or a Democrat, but if they were trying to convince me of something in favor of what they believe in, that would be wrong.

I think this is about neutrality. The Chicago principles are something I really ascribe to. We have gotten way far away from that, and the best thing we can do for students is to give them a diverse exposure to different opinions. We should have speakers on both sides of issues. Many of our [civics] centers have been doing that, including [at] Ohio State.

Q: People have criticized SB 1, as you know, as being something that encroaches on faculty autonomy and maybe more broadly university autonomy. Why do you think it is your prerogative as a state legislator to get involved in the nitty-gritty of universities?

A: These are state institutions. We spend $5 billion plus in every two-year budget on higher education, capital and operating costs.

We’re paying a lot of the bills; we certainly have a seat at the table in terms of the product that they produce. We’re not trying to be academics. Everybody in the Legislature—probably almost everybody—has been to college, so we’ve at least had our own college experience. I have a master’s degree in business; I taught in college as well. But I’m not an academic, and I don’t pretend to be an expert in that, and I don’t need to be.

What I need to do is to make sure that, like, the Bureau of Liquor Control is doing its job correctly—or if they’re not, we need to reform them. If the Ohio Department of Transportation is building crappy roads, we need to jump in and say, “Hey, we’re giving you all this money, your product stinks, we got lots of problems with it.”

Higher education’s no different. The difference is that the ODOT people would maybe not welcome our commentary, but they wouldn’t dispute the facts if we had them on the ground. Academics just have this turf issue that they don’t like to be told anything, which is why they’re not prone to reform themselves, which is why we had to step in and do that.

Q: What higher ed legislation are you pushing now—just the important pieces that you’re focusing on?

A: [Senate Bill 461] will strengthen the civic centers; that’s in process right now. I’m working on a couple of other things that I’m looking at, at different stages right now; one of them is looking at gen ed courses.

I can’t tell you how many parents I’ve had—and I did it myself as a parent when my kids were in college—[saying], “Why am I paying for you to take a required course in X, Y, Z?” Just because you go to Cleveland State, why do you have to take an urban studies course?

As an option, as an elective, fine. If you’re interested in that, great. We have some around the country that are requiring gender studies and other things. I’m going to be examining and asking the provost to come into my committees next year and tell us about their gen ed programs, because there’s a lot of courses that are just ridiculous—they’re a waste of money—but they’re the pet projects of key professors because it lines up with their research interests and so on. It’s not student-centric, it’s faculty-centric, and I think gen ed is going to be, probably next year, my biggest activity in looking further down the road in higher ed reform. And other states are doing that as well.

Q: So do you think you’ll try to pare down what actually can count for gen ed?

A: Yeah, and maybe we can reduce the number of hours, because I want to see three-year bachelor’s degrees, with some exceptions, and one of the ways to do that is not only College Credit Plus, but also reducing some of these gen ed requirements that are costing students and parents lots of money.