Classroom discussions at Ohio University may be shifting under Senate Bill 1, which went into effect June 13, 2025. The law requires professors to remain neutral when teaching “controversial topics” and to actively encourage multiple perspectives, raising concerns that debates and creative thinking in class could be constrained.
OU agreed to comply with the bill earlier this summer, which also required the university to eliminate its diversity, equity and inclusion programs and centers, including the Pride Center, the Multicultural Center and the Women’s Center.
Under the law, controversial topics include immigration, marriage, electoral politics, foreign policies, abortion, DEI programs and climate policies.
In an online public statement about the law, the university said “faculty and staff shall allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions about all controversial beliefs or policies and shall not seek to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious point of view.”
However, many of those topics, particularly climate change, are integral to coursework in majors such as environmental studies, geography and environmental geography.
Sarah Davis, an environmental studies professor, shared her view on Senate Bill 1, stating many professors encouraged discussions and debate before the bill was created.
“Most of us who teach these topics encourage healthy debate already in the classroom, and we've always made an effort to represent the different perspectives in the classroom,” Davis said. “[There’s] this idea that we want to engage with different perspectives, yet there are these limits on diversity and inclusion from programming at the same time, which feel like they're at odds with one another to me.”
Davis added that although the law exempts discussions that are “core to the discipline,” it still risks narrowing the ways professors and students can think critically.
“[The bill] clearly states that it's not intended to impose restrictions on topics if they are core to the discipline,” Davis said. “But by placing some kind of limit on how these topics can be discussed, it's sort of narrowing the lane in which we can think creatively and it has the potential to limit the innovation I think that comes out of our academic pursuits.”
Sam Pelham, a university spokesperson, said the bill does not intend to change any classroom material, but rather encourages opinion and diversity.
“The law encourages the development and offering of courses on a wide variety of topics that will allow for student choice,” Pelham said via email.
Pelham, quoting the bill’s language, said the law allows faculty to exercise “professional judgment about how to accomplish intellectual diversity within an academic discipline.”
The bill allows this unless professional judgment is misused to “constrict intellectual diversity.”
Aoife McLaughlin, a junior environmental studies student in the Honors Tutorial College, said she believes everyone has a place at the table.
“Everyone has different opinions, and people need to learn to work together and hear each other,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin said the law complicates discussions on issues like climate change, where politics and economics already loom large.
“I feel like, since America is a capitalist society that promotes efficiency and economic growth, and especially since we're a country dependent on stuff like oil, and oil is something that causes global warming, a lot of politics come into play about who wins and who loses, and usually the environment is the one losing in those situations,” McLaughlin said.
She added she hopes OU President Lori Gonzalez will find ways to listen to students while complying with state law.
“I just hope that Lori Gonzalez will listen to her students when it comes to dealing with SB 1,” McLaughlin said. “I know, since it is the state legislature, she has to comply, or we lose our funding, but I do hope that she finds ways to actually represent her student population and student body.”
