Group launches 'Hail Mary' attempt to repeal Senate Bill 1, Ohio higher education overhaul

Yahoo

11-04-2025

A group of Youngstown State University faculty knows the odds are against them collecting enough signatures to block Ohio's new higher education overhaul Senate Bill 1 at the ballot box. But no one else was trying.
"Even if we can't necessarily do this ourselves, we need to start the process," said Mark Vopat, president of the Youngstown State University Chapter of the Ohio Education Association. So, they launched a website and plan to collect the initial 1,000 signatures needed to start a ballot effort. "In one sense, it's really a Hail Mary play."
Vopat said Senate Bill 1, signed into law by Gov. Mike DeWine on March 28, threatens the future of quality higher education in Ohio. The bill would ban diversity, equity and inclusion on campus, ban faculty strikes, prevent universities from taking positions on controversial issues, require syllabi to be posted online, among other changes.
"I believe this bill was a solution looking for a problem," Vopat said.
Sen. Jerry Cirino, the Lake County Republican who championed Senate Bill 1, said the faculty union is likely underestimating what it would take to mount a successful referendum. Cirino suggested professors would offer their students extra credit to collect signatures − a line he used previously to explain why students were protesting the bill.
'We would certainly expend lots of effort to defend the bill that we believe is the right bill," Cirino said. 'If this Youngstown faculty group wants to go head-to-head with me on this bill, bring it on.'
Ohio voters can repeal most new laws using a process called a referendum, but there's a ticking clock: opponents must collect the required signatures within 90 days. That means the professors have until the end of June to collect 248,092 valid signatures, or 6% of the turnout in the last governor's race total.
Referendums are extremely difficult to pull off. The last attempt was a well-funded effort to block a $1 billion nuclear bailout in House Bill 6. But signature collectors came up short amid unprecedented opposition, which the FBI would later reveal included an illegal pay-to-play scheme.
The American Association of University Professors led the charge against Senate Bill 1 at the statehouse, but it isn't spearheading a referendum now.
"We'd like nothing more than to see this bill repealed, but we also understand the resources it would take and hurdles that would have to be overcome to accomplish that," AAUP Ohio Conference Executive Director Sara Kilpatrick said. "Unfortunately, we couldn't in good conscience commit to spearheading a campaign we're unable to fund. We certainly understand the desire of other groups and individuals to tackle this effort."
The last successful referendum was in 2011 when Ohio voters rejected an anti-collective bargaining law championed by then-Gov. John Kasich.
Vopat sees elements of Senate Bill 5 in this higher education overhaul. The bill bans faculty from striking and allows universities to fire tenured professors for poor performance. "I think this is a slow chipping away at labor rights across Ohio," he said.
So, the Youngstown State faculty union is starting the ball rolling and hoping others join in, Vopat said. "I'm keeping my fingers crossed that other people come on board."
State government reporter Jessie Balmert can be reached at [e-mail] or @jbalmert on X.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Group wants to put repeal of Ohio Senate Bill 1 before voters