Senate Bill 83, the higher education overhaul bill that has sparked extreme pushback from the Cleveland State community, will not be brought to the Ohio House floor during the lame-duck period, announced by Speaker Jason Stephens (R-Kitts Hill) last Tuesday.
Sponsored by Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland), S.B. 83 has not seen any movement in the House for almost a year after having quickly passed in the Ohio Senate and the Higher Education Committee.
“No, we’re not going to deal with Senate Bill 83,” Stephens shared with reporters last Tuesday. “…We’ve got a lot of other things that are a lot more important than that.”
Despite being disappointed, Cirino intends to reintroduce the bill in the next General Assembly, where it may have better luck.
“Just because the Speaker [Stephens] doesn’t seem to grasp the importance of this as a needed reform bill in higher education in Ohio does not in any way take away from its value,” Cirino said in an interview on Nov. 15. “And so, we will be pursuing this in the future. I will be persistent, as I’ve told you before, in making this happen.”
Cirino even shared that he is interested in bringing back provisions previously eliminated to assuage bipartisan disagreement, such as the ban on faculty strikes.
The recent election of Sen. Matt Huffam (R-Lima), who has been president of the Senate for four years, as the new House Speaker signals a newfound optimism for the bill’s future, given that he is an avid supporter for its passage. Huffman ran unopposed, and will succeed Stephens, a Republican moderate who announced prior to the Speaker vote that he would not re-run to keep the gavel.
CSU community pushback
The Cleveland State community, including students, faculty and President Laura Bloomberg, Ph.D., have condemned the bill repeatedly.
S.B. 83, which has seen nearly a dozen iterations, bans most mandatory diversity, equity and inclusion training, and requires “intellectual diversity” on “climate policies; electoral politics; foreign policy; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; immigration policy; marriage; or abortion” in Ohio public universities.
The bill also requires schools to have a mandatory American history or government course, which would include reading assignments of the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Federalist Papers, Emancipation Proclamation, Gettysburg Address and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.
The current iteration features a new retrenchment provision that would prevent unions from negotiating on tenure.
“The current iteration of S.B. 83 is still a far overreach of politics into important aspects of university life and its operations,” Andrew Slifkin, then-president of the CSU Chapter of the American Association of University Processors (AAUP), shared with The Cauldron in January 2024.
Students have spoken out against the bill since it was first introduced, prompting the CSU Student Government Association (SGA) to pass a resolution in April 2023 condemning it, the first student government in Ohio to do so. SGA also signed a joint letter of multiple Ohio universities and the CSU AAUP, which represents 203,784 college students opposing the bill.
CSU’s chapter of the Ohio Student Association has previously called the bill, also known as the Higher Education Enhancement Act, the “Higher Education Destruction Act.” CSU’s chapter of the College Democrats also rejects the bill and seeks to “educate voters…and create the pressure necessary to protect our fellow students at CSU.”
Bloomberg, who met with Cirino last summer to discuss S.B. 83, explained in an April 2023 interview with The Cauldron that while she supports some parts of the bill, there are others she does not.
For example, Bloomberg is a known supporter for free speech, which S.B. 83 sponsors believe the bill champions, but she isn’t as convinced. Also, she worries about the provision of the bill that seeks to ban relationships between Ohio and Chinese universities, and what it would do to CSU’s relationship with Chinese scholars and students.
Should the bill pass, Bloomberg wishes to uphold CSU principles and avoid pitting the Board of Trustees, administration and faculty against each other.
Ele Solovyov 
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