No Higher Education in Ohio

The latest thinking is 4.5 billion years ago there was an Earth, but no oceans. The water arrived disguised as rock — dry-looking stones carrying wet cargo, floating around a young star, waiting on time. Nobody voted on this. Nobody needed to. Physics doesn't hold hearings.

Ohio's Senate Bill 1 requires the state's public universities to treat "controversial beliefs and policies" with neutrality — a list that includes, by statute, climate policy, alongside immigration, marriage, DEI, abortion, electoral politics. Faculty are directed to "allow and encourage students to reach their own conclusions" on designated controversial topics. Critics argue that, in practice, this risks treating established scientific conclusions as if they were merely competing viewpoints. More than 1,500 people submitted testimony against the bill; opponents, including the ACLU of Ohio, called it the Higher Education Destruction Act. It passed anyway, 20 to 11. Ohio's public universities have since begun dismantling their DEI offices in compliance. The bill's own sponsor admitted he hadn't consulted anyone who studies climate before deciding it was controversial.

This is the clean case, the easy one, the one where nobody's identity is on the line — or so it looks. Water moves toward ocean over billions of years regardless of what a legislature in Columbus decides to call debatable. The atmosphere retains heat according to the same radiative physics whether or not it's been assigned intellectual-diversity status. You can mandate neutrality on a policy. You cannot mandate it on a molecule. But notice what the clean case already tells you: if a government will stand up in session, ignore fifteen hundred witnesses, and vote that a molecule's behavior is a matter of opinion, there is no floor under what else it will vote on.

The same maneuver has been run before, on a harder case, with a body count. Modern genetics has found no biological basis for the discrete racial categories societies invented. Human genetic variation is real, but it forms continuous gradients rather than the sharply bounded groups race imagines. That wasn't always uncontroversial. It took centuries of "just asking questions" before the consensus was allowed to be a consensus, and the centuries were the point. The debate was never scientific. It was a place to put people while deciding what to do with them.

The same maneuver is running again. Trans people are watching a version of it right now, adjacent to bills like this one — not identical to SB1, which legislates institutional neutrality rather than curriculum content directly, but built from the same legal logic: take the growing body of biological, medical, and psychological research showing that sex and gender variation is more complex than the legal categories many legislatures attempt to impose, and declare it controversial by statute, so "debate" can stand in for years of direct legislation. SCOTUS this term, an election last year, and under all of it the same old move: if you can't win the science, relocate it to the opinion page.

There's a difference between disagreeing about how the ocean got made and legislating that the ocean isn't there.

Climate don't care. Neither does the genome. Both will go on behaving exactly as they do whether a legislature recognizes them or not. Reality has never waited for a roll-call vote. That's a comfort, and it is a real one, and it is not enough — because the molecule has never had to sit through a semester waiting for the truth to arrive on schedule. Someone does.

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