Republican Party candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy of Ohio. (Photo: WEWS.)
Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy is changing his mind on closing “low-cost” universities after bipartisan backlash.
At a town hall event in Strongsville on Friday, Ramaswamy pushed back against claims that he wants to close universities and utilize the savings to eliminate the state income tax. Now he says he never wanted to close universities, but rather to close programs at universities.
“I think we have too many duplicate programs in our universities,” Ramaswamy said. “When I look at a region, I want to look at Ohio in terms of regions, such as regional governance; I want each region to have the best higher education institutions available to the people of that region. But not every university has to offer every program.”
One attendee asked if it was true that he wanted to “close some schools.” He has repeatedly denied this, saying it is “untrue.”
He wants to have the best programs in the country in nursing, computer science, civil engineering and humanities, he added.
“They just don’t have to live under the same roof at the same university,” he said. “I want each region to offer the best it has to offer, but for us to consolidate some of these programs in the best interest of our students.”
Ramaswamy said he believes universities will reduce their overall costs by offering fewer programs.
Looking back: what did he say in his previous comments?
“We have too many of them,” the Republican said in a video posted to his Threads account in March. “They need to be consolidated.”
In an opinion piece he wrote for The Columbus’s shipmentRamaswamy encouraged the closure of what he called struggling universities. He referred to Cleveland State, the University of Akron, Kent State University and Central State University as facing previous challenges.
He tripled down on that idea in April.
“I don’t think you should fund crappy universities,” Ramaswamy told a student asking a question at a Turning Point US event.
Colleges should not duplicate themselves, he said, and the strongest programs should survive.
Backlash quickly followed, including from members of his own party such as Gov. Mike DeWine and Senate Finance Chairman Jerry Cirino, R-Kirtland, who is a GOP leader on higher education reform.
“What do you think? Do you think there will be trouble if he becomes governor and you fight it, or do you think the schools should merge?” we asked Cirino at the end of June.
“Well, there are a lot of questions in this, so I’ll try to answer them… I don’t know how much he knows about how higher education works in the state of Ohio,” Cirino said.
Cirino said he looked forward to discussions with Ramaswamy. He said consolidation could be discussed, but more in terms of additional university branches rather than main campuses.
“I think the right minds need to get together in a room for a while to try to understand how we can’t sacrifice the provision of higher education or post-secondary education while not sustaining the costs that we have today using infrastructure adapted to the 1960s,” Cirino said.
If Ramaswamy meant real consolidation rather than an end to funding for “weak” universities, Cirino said it would have been more widely accepted because he advocated eliminating low-enrollment fields.
Ramaswamy’s gubernatorial opponents oppose this because Ohio has colleges throughout the state that provide students with access to a nearby, high-quality university.
David Pepper, Democratic nominee for Gov. Amy Acton, said it shows how out of touch Ramaswamy has been with everyday Ohioans, pointing out that the Republican came up with the idea of cutting college funding to support pay for an overall income tax cut.
“A tax credit that helps everyone at the top and students, especially from poor communities, Vivek Ramaswamy says: ‘Get in your car, pay for your room and get in hundreds of miles away or I’ll deprive you of your local opportunity to get a degree,’” Pepper said.
Defending his article, Ramaswamy said the universities he mentioned were just “examples of where tuition fees are rising.”
“That’s a big leap in terms of whether or not the university should be closed,” Ramaswamy said, as a participant further questioned his position. “But are there individual programs that we can say, ‘OK, this one belongs to this university, and this one belongs to this university in this region – whichever I like.’
University rectors have spoken
The candidate noticed that the university authorities probably did not like his idea.
Both Cleveland State and Kent State presidents they rebuked his position.
“We must respect the identity of our public universities, which were established for specific purposes to meet the needs of their region. All options must be discussed – there are many ways of thinking about programs and strategic partnerships that are far from consolidating and achieving the goals of being more agile and effective higher education institutions,” Cleveland State President Dr. Laura Bloomberg said in April.
Kent State University President Dr. Todd Diacon took a more assertive approach, providing a lengthy response to “anyone who has questions about Ohio’s public universities.”
“During the decade of the 1960s, we built 60 new buildings. These buildings were filled with the sons and daughters of the Greatest Generation, ready to build Ohio’s future,” Diacon wrote in part. “It wasn’t a waste of time. It was Ohio’s investment in itself.”
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This article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and are published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free republication on other news outlets because it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.
