University Senate votes against Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society: What does this decision really mean?

Garret Travers
Fri, 31 Jan 2025 06:00:55 +0000
Campus, Instagram Page, National, News, Politics, and Society, campus, civics, culture, DEI, education politics, higher education, Intellectual Diversity, jared gardner, laws, Lee Strang, Ohio house, Ohio legislature, ohio senate, politics, Salmon P. Chase center, Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, SB 1, SB 83, Senate Bill 1, Senate Bill 83, society, staff, statutes, students, university senate

The University Senate recently voted against approving the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, but the center will still move forward as legally required. The center will be hosted in the John Glenn College of Public Affairs as a separate, independent entity. Credit: Garret Travers | Senior Lantern Reporter

Students and staff in Ohio State’s University Senate voted against the introduction of the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society on campus — but its vote won’t prevent the legally required center from opening in autumn 2025.?

The Senate met for its monthly meeting Jan. 23 to vote in favor of or against the Chase Center. Created by Senate Bill 117, the intellectual diversity center will host programs, classes and events to promote student speech and foist “conservative ideology on academia” to combat “leftist ideology,” according to prior Lantern reporting and the Ohio Senate’s website.?

The outcome of the proposal was a vote of 64 to 57 with four abstentions, leading to a consensus against approving the center, Jared Gardner, the University Senate secretary, said in an email. Despite the vote, Garner said “the Center is going forward, as the law requires.”

Gardner said the proposal from the Council on Academic Affairs and its subcommittee “was the result of months of work, many hours of consultation and conversation with senate members and constituents on the part of Center Director Lee Strang, and advice and guidance from offices across the university, including the Office of Academic Affairs, Human Resources, Deans in Arts and Sciences and other colleges, and individual faculty with overlapping areas of interest.”?

Pranav Jani, a professor of English and president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said those who called a “no” vote on the proposal “respected that work and tried to participate in it.”

“We didn’t call for a ‘No’ vote until our town hall meeting, which 60 faculty attended including senators,” Jani said. “The majority made it clear the Senate proposal was not enough. The Chase Center is an anomaly, forced on OSU by politicians with a fixed agenda who are making a mockery of the practice of shared governance. The faculty we spoke with did not want to Senate to sign onto that. Clearly, the majority agreed.”

The center will be funded by the Ohio government as a result of SB 117, which will implement centers similar to Ohio State’s Chase Center at four other universities across Ohio, including the University of Toledo, Miami University, Wright State University and Cleveland State University, according to the Ohio Senate’s website and the Ohio Capital Journal.?

The center will be led by Strang, a former professor of law at the University of Toledo, according to prior Lantern reporting. Since the center was announced, Strang said in an email it has “resulted in numerous partnerships with faculty, departments, and colleges across the university,” and that these relationships “will enrich Ohio State’s students and faculty.”?

“The Chase Center decided early on to take a collaborative approach toward the university community, both as a faithful implementation of the Center’s mission and to integrate the Center into the broader Ohio State community,” Strang said. “These collaborations will continue, and the Chase Center looks forward to working collaboratively with Ohio State colleagues in the coming years to offer research on teaching of citizenship education.”

According to prior Lantern reporting, Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) introduced SB 83 — a piece of legislation focused on combating “leftist ideology in higher education,” promoting intellectual diversity and banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs across educational institutions in Ohio, including Ohio State — in spring 2023.?

Cirino is working to pass SB 83 again — which originally failed to pass in 2023, and was opposed by the university Board of Trustees. He said in light of the passage of SB 117, he feels the bill would “safeguard the right to free speech and enhance intellectual diversity” across Ohio’s public higher education institutions, according to Cirino’s special commentary on the bill. ?

SB 117 places a legal requirement on Ohio State to open the Chase Center, while also providing the university with the necessary funding to do so, according to prior Lantern reporting.

University spokesperson Chris Booker said in an email, “while we respect the voice of the [University Senate], we are disappointed in the vote.”?

“The Chase Center was established in 2023 by the state of Ohio via statute, and Ohio State must develop and operate the center in line with those legal requirements,” Booker said. “Ohio State will move forward and structure the center in accordance with the enabling legislation to serve its statutory mission of educating for citizenship.”

The Ohio Senate has begun hearings for SB 1 — the “Enact Advance Ohio Higher Education” Act — which was introduced by Cirino Jan. 22, 2025, and aims to ensure “academic excellence” by promoting free speech and intellectual diversity, according to the Ohio Senate’s website.

In addition, SB 1 will ban “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion courses, training, litmus tests, required statements, and spending for any DEI initiatives or programs with the same intent,” according to the Ohio Senate’s website.?

Notably, Gardner said the recent introduction of SB 1 was not a “determining factor” in the vote.”

“Maybe a vote or two, but not enough to make a difference,” Gardner said.

Beyond the vote, Gardner said SB 1 “is part of a larger moment in which higher education feels very much under attack, and all our senators feel that keenly.”?

Even so, SB 1 will be on the University Senate’s radar, as the Senate has a “vital role to play” in the work “to make the university better in a way that will serve our students and state for a new generation,” Gardner said.??

“I work daily with administrators, faculty, staff and students from across our vast university, and there is no more ethical, dedicated, and passionate community to be found anywhere,” Gardner said. “Somehow we have to get past this cycle of suspicion and punishment — on what I know to be false premises — and back to where we should be: working together to make our state the envy of the nation and a model for how we will master the challenges of the next century.”?

Additionally, Gardner said the vote was characterized by many as symbolic.

“Which I suspect made it easier to vote ‘no,’ believing doing so would have no negative impact,” Gardner said. “For me, having watched the hard and responsible work on the part of my fellow senators and partners in OAA, Legal, Government Affairs, and the Glenn College, it was never a symbolic vote.”

Jani said the vote was not symbolic, but rather “a matter of principle, after all other efforts failed.”

This story was updated at 10:22 a.m. Jan. 31 to specify the connection between SB 117 and SB 83, and at 8:01 p.m. to include the perspective of “no” voters on the University Senate. ?