BUCKEYES: Protect your right to free speech on campus
The Ohio State Board of Trustees, President Ted Carter
The Trump Administration is moving to consolidate control of universities across the nation by extorting our presidents into pledging allegiance to its agenda through the compact. This “loyalty oath” is nothing but a ransom note, demanding our administrators trade our academic freedom and campus independence for vague federal funding promises. Buckeyes have already felt the disastrous effects of Senate Bill 1: from losing our DEI programs and scholarships, to the chalk ban, to the crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech, we cannot afford any more sanctions on our education or our freedom of speech.
OSU students, faculty, and alumni must unite in loud opposition. Our campus was once a beacon of academic freedom, educational affordability, and safety for students - we cannot allow Trump to further reduce it to pawns in a partisan agenda.
Sign our petition urging OSU’s Administration to reject Trump’s College Compact and to reinstate our freedom of speech on this campus.
Sponsored by
To:
The Ohio State Board of Trustees, President Ted Carter
From:
[Your Name]
Dear Ohio State University Presidents and Boards of Trustees:
We, your students, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members, call on you to pledge to reject the Trump Administration’s “Loyalty Oath” compact. As Trump has informally widened his demand to all universities, Ohio’s higher education system is now on the line. If adopted, it would force our schools to restrict enrollment for international students, further restrict protests, and demand that our schools pledge ideological loyalty to the Trump administration. It’s up to each campus’s President and Board of Trustees to decide: cower to the partisan extremists vying to capture political control of our campuses, or pledge to stand up for our universities.
In Ohio, we’ve already seen this extremist agenda unfold on our campuses, with our faculty and students experiencing the most significant impact. The “Advance Ohio Higher Education Act,” Senate Bill 1, gutted our universities, implementing some of the extremist provisions we see in the compact. As a result, our classroom discussions are tense, our classmates fear repression, and our governor is scrambling to find students to fill the beds in our dorms. Our campuses can’t afford another round of extremist overreach.
It has become apparent to students and faculty at The Ohio State University, that under the leadership of President Ted Carter, OSU is failing its community catastrophically, and that his decisions are not made with our wants, needs, or well-being in mind.
As such, we have no choice but to demand action. We demand that President Carter, The Board of Trustees, and the University Administration implement the following changes for the purpose of protecting and improving upon free speech rights and ending the university's shift towards repression, abandonment, and blatant disregard of the buckeye community that OSU has made since he assumed the position of University President.
Our demands are as follows:
1. A public rejection of Trump’s Compact deal and commit to preserving the free speech rights of all Buckeyes
2. The expungement of disciplinary infractions from the student currently suing OSU, Guy Christensen’s, transcript and record
3. A public affirmation that the university will not assist ICE or DHS in intimidating, punishing, or deporting international students
4. An end to the policing of student dress and speech, specifically the targeting of pro-Palestinian speech
5. The reinstatement of students’ right to use amplified sound
6. The reinstatement of students’ right to use sidewalk chalk on university property
7. A restoration of Resident Advisors’ ability to decorate dorm halls with non-OSU-related imagery
8. A restoration of professors’ right to have land acknowledgements on their syllabi
To our knowledge, the Ohio State University has not been contacted by the federal government regarding the compact, but every university in the nation has its eyes on this bribe now that MIT, Brown, and more have bravely rejected it. We encourage our administrators to resist early.
Buckeyes: Defend your Freedom of Speech. Reject the Compact.