Hundreds of students protested against Senate Bill 1 on Ohio State’s campus on March 4, 2025. (Photo by Megan Henry, Ohio Capital Journal).
We have seen dictatorial regimes throughout history attempt to destroy great institutions of higher learning that fail to sufficiently align themselves with the ruling ideology of the state. But we’ve never seen it happen in Ohio or the United States — until now.
In Columbus, demagogic rulers, ignoring massive opposition, have moved to dramatically tighten their control over the state’s public universities, constrict academic freedoms, and ban faculty from striking. Ohio colleges and universities, including Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati, are also being terrorized by Trumpian investigations and threats of funding cuts. Hold that thought.
In countries where the state is all powerful, citizens and institutions are told what to think, how to act, and even what words they can and cannot use. Free thinkers who speak openly, who demand the right to assemble and peacefully protest on college campuses, city streets or public squares, face imprisonment or worse in regimes that will not tolerate dissent. In those places, survival means keeping your head down and your mouth shut.
It is oppressive by design under iron rule from China to Russia. Society is cowed into conformity. Inalienable rights are not recognized. Hungary’s and Turkey’s decent into dictatorship quickly stripped away civil liberties, undermined the rule of law, clamped down on the press, commandeered legislative authority, weakened judicial independence, and seized control of public university systems. All red flags that signal the death of democratic self-determination.
We can see democracy dying there, the capturing of institutions, the silencing of critics, the plundering of public assets by oligarchs bowing to corrupt authoritarians. But we still can’t fathom it happening here, in America. Yet clearly, our democratic republic is in the throes of death as the wildly emboldened felon-in-chief and his oligarchic clique of enforcers aim fatal blows at our foundational values.
The Trump administration is explicitly threatening to bring the full power of the state against institutions and individuals it doesn’t like. It wants to extract revenge for old grievances, muzzle dissent and especially sow fear.
Besides cruelty, paralyzing fear is the point of the administration dangling prosecutions, investigations, and financial ruin over select targets from the media to private law firms or political opponents to campus protestors and universities dependent on federal grants. How is this different than what Turkey and Hungary are doing to dominate and crush?
Ohio State University and the University of Cincinnati recently learned that they, and dozens of colleges and universities across the country, are being investigated by the federal government for alleged antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
Both OSU and UC were also notified that they are under a second federal investigation for partnering with a graduate partnership program that focuses on helping students from diverse backgrounds pursue a business PhD. The small diversity project was low hanging fruit for the anti-DEI police in the Trump U.S. Department of Education which grabbed it as a pretext to accuse the schools, 45 in all, of using “racial preferences” in education.
This is a deliberate intimidation campaign by Trump and his billionaire kleptocrats to score points with a MAGA base that loves to bash universities as no-good bastions of liberalism. But it is also a dramatic escalation of heavy state power over academic institutions.
The implicit punishment for OSU and UC — for participating in a program to promote the racial diversity of business school professors and for allegedly not doing enough to protect Jewish students during campus protests against Israel — is a devastating claw back of federal funding.
The administration threatens to take federal money from schools that defy the Dear Leader on anything from DEI to transgender athletes in women’s sports or student demonstrations Trump chillingly deems “illegal.”
Columbia University, once a hotbed of protests over the Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, was an easy mark for the wannabe authoritarian eager to show the elite, Ivy League institution who’s boss.
The government yanked $400 million from Columbia then sicced immigration agents on a green-card-holding protestor (a permanent legal resident of the U.S.) before spiriting the Columbia student away from his pregnant American wife to a Louisianna detention facility where, uncharged with any crime save protesting, he remains.
The Trump administration further demanded that Columbia meet a list of significant conditions, including changes to its admission and disciplinary rules, if it wanted its money back.
Bringing the weight of the government down on academia with targeted hostility and financial extortion is meant to terrorize higher education institutions into anticipatory obedience.
Ohio colleges and universities have already rushed to scrap anything that might promote dreadful goals like diverse student bodies, equal learning opportunities or inclusive environments where all are welcome. They fell like dominoes: Ohio State University, Ohio University, Kent State University, Miami University, Bowling Green State University, Baldwin Wallace University, Ashland University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Toledo, the University of Akron.
Just days after Ohio University put this year’s Black Alumni Reunion on hold out of an abundance of DEI caution, it did the same to an event in honor of Women’s History Month at one of its satellite campuses.
That’s the fear factor at work. We’ve seen this kind of cowering conformity in dictatorial regimes where freedoms go to die. But never in Ohio or the United States. Until now. It’s unbelievable.
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