Campaign to overturn Ohio’s new higher education law falls short of making November ballot
COLUMBUS, Ohio–Ohio voters will not decide this year whether to overturn a new, controversial higher-education law, as organizers of a proposed referendum said Thursday they didn’t turn in enough signatures to make the ballot.
The campaign against Senate Bill 1, launched by a group of Youngstown State University professors, needed 248,092 valid signatures from registered voters, including a certain amount from at least 44 of Ohio’s 88 counties, to qualify for the November ballot.
The anti-SB1 campaign, at last count, had gathered 194,981 signatures and met the signature requirement from 33 counties, campaign organizers said at a news conference Thursday outside an Ohio State University fraternity house.
Thursday is the deadline to turn in signatures against SB1, which takes effect Friday.
Amanda Fehlbaum, a sociology professor at Youngstown State and one of the campaign’s lead organizers, said the campaign would have gotten the needed signatures if they had another weekend to collect them.
Fehlbaum lamented that her group “wasted” about two weeks waiting in vain for other organizations to take the lead in organizing a repeal effort.
She said she reached out for help to several public-sector labor unions, which she didn’t identify by name, but she never heard back.
Other groups that did reply, Fehlbaum said, told organizers that a repeal effort would be too expensive to pull off, as it would require millions of dollars to be successful.
“We were told that folks had been active (with protests) before SB1 passed were too tired from those efforts and that it was difficult to organize during the summer, when students aren’t on campus,” Fehlbaum added.
Instead, Fehlbaum said, her group by itself organized about 1,700 volunteers to collect signatures. By the end, the group was collecting about 4,000 signatures per day, said Mark Vopat, president of the Youngstown Education Association and another anti-SB1 campaign organizer.
“I started this I thought that we were alone. I thought no one in Ohio cared,” Vopat said. “And I was extremely heartened to see the outpouring of support against SB1 and for our cause. …What we saw were people coming out of the woodwork to help us.”
While the SB1 repeal effort is now dead, Vopat said his group is looking at other potential options to fight the new law, including filing a lawsuit, having repeal legislation introduced in the Ohio General Assembly or getting a state constitutional amendment on the ballot to override the new law.
SB1, passed by Republican lawmakers and signed by Gov. Mike DeWine in March, imposes a variety of new rules for Ohio’s 14 public universities and 23 public community colleges.
The rules include, among other things, banning college faculty strikes; limiting subjects covered by collective bargaining agreements; prohibiting diversity, equity and inclusion at public colleges and universities; requiring professors to recognize an “intellectual diversity” of opinions; and allowing college administrators to seek a post-tenure review for any professor who receives low marks on their annual evaluations.
Under the new state budget bill lawmakers sent to DeWine on Wednesday, public colleges and universities that don’t follow the new rules laid out in SB1 would lose state funding.
Proponents say the new law is intended to curb liberals from muzzling conservative opinions on college campuses. Opponents say it’s an attack on labor unions and will limit what professors can teach, hurting faculty and student recruitment.
State Sen. Jerry Cirino, a Lake County Republican who introduced SB1, indicated Thursday that he wasn’t surprised that ballot-issue organizers fell short.
“I felt there was not enough support out there to repudiate something that makes so much sense for Ohio and our higher institutions of learning,” he said. “There was no way that it made sense to go back and revert to some of the issues Senate Bill 1 was dealing with.”
Cirino said he has “been in touch with all the university presidents” and that they’re already working to be in compliance.
Anna Staver contributed to this story.
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