S.B. 1, a contentious state higher education bill, is likely to become law after passing both the Ohio Senate and House over the last few weeks.
The Republican-championed legislation bans diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts at universities, among other changes – including one that could put pressure on, or significantly reduce, the Judaic Studies Department at the University of Cincinnati.
“A state institution of higher education shall eliminate any undergraduate degree program it offers if the institution confers…fewer than five degrees in that program annually,” the bill states.
Despite plenty of students taking classes, that’s a bar UC’s Judaic Studies doesn’t clear. It offers just one undergraduate major, one minor, and two certificates.
“Right now, we have around 185 students taking our courses in the spring semester,” said Rabbi Matthew Kraus, head of the department. But “we don’t have five majors per year.”
(Kraus spoke with Cincy Jewfolk in a personal capacity, not as a representative of the university.)
Like much of S.B. 1, the elimination requirement isn’t very specific on end results. It doesn’t state, for example, if a “degree program” being eliminated also means classes or departments associated with that degree would continue.
There is a possibility that the department could continue as is, just without providing any majors. But that’s an unusual situation for a department. It’s also not clear what might happen to the minor and two certificates the department offers.
Kraus has taken it to mean, most likely, that Judaic Studies as a separate department would stop existing. Instead, classes and programming might continue, but with faculty spread across other departments.
As far as Kraus is concerned, that setup would severely reduce the quality of Jewish and Hebrew classes by putting department heads with little understanding of Judaic Studies in charge of hiring and class management.
“The best way to deliver these Jewish studies at the university is through a department,” he said. “We have expertise in finding and hiring people. We have expertise in training them so that they’re successful in the university.”
Degrading Judaic Studies will also have a net negative effect on the broader Jewish community in Cincinnati.
“If we want to attract people who have some Jewish cultural capital, or we want to create people with Jewish cultural capital, we have to have these Jewish studies programs,” he said.
Ending the Judaic Studies Department might cause other problems, too. As Kraus understands it, the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati endowment that established a named chair in the department also requires the department to exist.
If the department is eliminated, UC would likely have “to forfeit the endowment of that endowed chair,” Kraus said. “That’s bad for Jewish studies, and also bad for the university.”
The Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati declined to comment on S.B. 1’s potential effects on the Judaic Studies chair endowment.
Kraus pointed out that this part of the higher education bill would also eviscerate programs focused on African studies, women and gender studies, and Arabic studies – smaller departments often catering to niche and multicultural areas of academia.
Across the country, those kinds of departments have been targeted by Republicans in recent years, including by President Donald Trump, over allegations that they are hotbeds of antisemitism and anti-Israel activism.
Under Trump’s directive, the federal government withheld almost half a billion dollars of funding to pressure Columbia University in New York, in part, to change how the Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Department was being managed.
S.B. 1 does offer a way for degree programs to avoid being eliminated. The chancellor of the Ohio Department of Higher Education can “grant a waiver” to universities.
However, the application and negotiation process over that waiver may come with its own issues. S.B. 1 lets the chancellor “establish terms under which the state institution may conditionally continue the program,” including whether it can receive state funding.
“I believe that what would happen is, [the UC Judaic Studies Department] would ask the College of Arts and Sciences to appeal to the provost, and then the provost and president would appeal to the chancellor,” Kraus said of his expectations of the waiver process.
“The appeals process is unclear and may pit one department against another department,” he said. “I don’t know what that will look like, but an undefined, potentially arbitrary appeals process puts Judaic Studies more at risk.”
The power that the chancellor has over this process is in line with a broader theme of S.B. 1: Supporters cast it as a way to protect students in higher education from liberal indoctrination.
Widespread opposition, meanwhile, sees the bill as a politically-motivated way for state politicians to micromanage faculty and suppress academic opinions they dislike.
Kraus is part of that opposition, having written letters of testimony to the Ohio Legislature against S.B. 1, along with hundreds of others.
“Programs are vetted and approved by the faculty after a lengthy, rigorous, and public process,” he said. “The state legislature, however, has usurped faculty governance over the curriculum and handed it over to a single, untransparent and arbitrary authority.”
The legislation also takes aim at faculty by banning strikes, making it easier to fire tenured professors, and enforcing “intellectual diversity” while mandating professors not to “indoctrinate” students with specific perspectives on “controversial beliefs” in the classroom.
“‘Controversial belief or policy’ means any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy,” the bill states, “including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion.”
Democratic State House Rep. Dani Isaacsohn, the Jewish state lawmaker representing the Cincinnati area, called S.B. 1 a form of censorship.
“It’s an infantilization of our students, and it really harms the ability for Ohio to provide high-quality higher education, which is at the bedrock of any sort of economic development and future for the state,” he said.
Isaacsohn also criticized S.B. 1’s mandate of “intellectual diversity,” which makes it sound like professors can’t unequivocally tell students that the Nazis were bad, for example, or that the Holocaust really did happen.
“Every professor should have the ability to say, ‘No, no, no, we don’t question whether the Holocaust occurred. It is a known fact. We’re not going to debate that fact,’” he said. “S.B. 1 actually would encourage debate on things like that. And so it’s very twisted.”
Kraus is also concerned about what he sees as S.B. 1’s infringement on academic speech and faculty’s ability to teach. It doesn’t help that the legislation is not very specific, which makes faculty afraid to express any opinion — no matter how settled it may be.
“One example given, if a student declares that they believe that the earth is flat – and we perform our pedagogical duty and categorically state that such a belief is wrong, and say all science disproves that – we might get reprimanded,” Kraus said. “The legislature claims that’s not going to happen, but there’s a legitimate fear that that could happen.”
In a legislative update page, the University of Cincinnati said it doesn’t see S.B. 1 affecting how and what faculty actually teach in the classroom.
“Aside from requiring the creation of an American civil literacy course, and so long as faculty allow students to express intellectual diversity (as that term is defined in the current version of the legislation), we do not currently anticipate that this legislation will limit what our faculty can teach,” the page said.
“In our view, the provision in this legislation that precludes taking a position on any ‘controversial belief or policy’ applies to official statements or positions by university employees on behalf of the institution.”
It’s also not clear how S.B. 1 would affect efforts by universities to address antisemitism or otherwise serve Jewish students, as the bill tells institutions not to prioritize or serve any particular group of students more than others.
Outside of the Judaic Studies Department, Kraus also sees S.B. 1 as having a negative effect on Jewish students and faculty.
There is a likelihood that prospective students and academics will avoid studying and working in Ohio because of the legislation. And as part of the University of Cincinnati, anything negatively affecting it will trickle down to all parts and members of the institution.
But in a larger sense, Jews have often benefited from robust and free universities, Kraus said. Attacks on those institutions are usually a sign of oncoming oppression and hard times for the Jewish community.
“We flourish in a free society that has free intellectual inquiry,” Kraus said. “Even if there are issues and challenges, we [need] places where we can have difficult conversations — and universities provide that.”
