What is Ohio State Even For?

For people who live outside of Columbus, the salient feature of central Ohio is the Ohio State University. I suspect even a healthy amount of folks who reside in Franklin County know nothing of High Street beyond what occurs within a mile of the Lane Ave intersection.  As much as I'd like for there to be a popular association with Columbus that goes beyond the enormous scarlet-and-grey blob near our city center, there's just no getting away from how Ohio State shapes the local culture and economy.  This in itself is not necessarily a bad thing-- it brings luminaries like Rick Steves to my neighborhood, after all.  But Ohio State as it's understood by both Columbus residents and the broader world is mainly understood for one thing: Buckeye football.

The NCAA is a massive business that would not exist but for the academic institutions that give legitimacy to its insanely lucrative, insanely exploitative teenage-athletics-as-entertainment scheme.  So you'd think that at least of few prominent Ohio Republicans would be alarmed at Ohio Senate Bill 1, a sinister attack on the colleges that help sustain the fiction that gives Columbus its local and national brand.  As the Ohio Capital Journal succinctly puts it in its excellent summary of the potential law, SB1 "substitutes governmental edicts for academic freedom; eliminates all diversity, equity, and inclusion activities on campuses; restricts how faculty teach; bans faculty strikes; and restructures the terms and the mission of each institution’s board of trustees."  It's scary, draconian stuff, and yet, as the OCJ points out, not one president of an Ohio public university has formally testified against the bill.

This reluctance to speak out against what appears to be an existential threat to the most basic mission of higher education institutions seems consistent with something that people who have been reading the news in the past year might have noticed about university presidents: that they are, in a word, cowards.  The protests for Palestine that have erupted across the country on college campuses have not been met with anything close to sympathy or understanding by college administrations.  Indeed, in public statements made after an Ohio State protest that saw literal snipers on literal roofs surveying unarmed student activists, as well as dozens of arrests, OSU President Ted Carter applauded law enforcement, boasting that "Ohio State will not be overtaken."  In an e-mail to the student body, Carter affirmed that, in his mind, the arrests were not about putting a limit on the "content" of speech, saying "I welcome and value free speech... As many of you know, I wore the cloth of our nation for 38 years to support and defend these rights."

Alright, Ted.  Ohio Senate Bill 1 pretty clearly does put hard limits on the "content" of speech.  The bill states that public universities shall not "endorse or oppose... any controversial belief or policy."  It also forbids using "DEI requirements" to determine scholarships, even as it demands that universities "demonstrate" a commitment to "ideological diversity," i.e. affirmative action for dumb conservative ideas.  So where you at now, Ted, free-speech-champ ol' buddy?  Unless you're very deliberately playing dumb, it's not hard to see where all this is coming from.  The pro-Palestine encampments were perceived as an institutional threat by college administrators and Republican lawmakers, and the former is happy to stay silent and nod along while the latter does everything it can to clamp down on unwanted speech acts.

All of which seems like it would be really, really bad for central Ohio, which depends so much on its big-ass public university, until you remember that for most people, the Ohio State University is not a place for finding your place in the world, challenging received wisdom, engaging with different perspectives, or even simply getting a bachelor's degree.  No: the Ohio State University is for Buckeye football.  And though Senate Bill 1, once old Mike DeWine whistles its way into law, might present some problems for attracting potential football fans to the state (to say nothing of keeping some of the intelligent ones around), it most likely won't interrupt the steady flow of the one thing that truly matters to the ardent supporters of the Ohio State University.